![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyIf I spend time enumerating all the flaws of every movie I see, it's not because I am a mean and cynical person. It's because I need to figure out how to do this thing. I am not completely one of those relativists who'll say that everything comes down to personal taste. I won't argue that each artistic thing has a specific value to it and everyone who disagrees is wrong--rather, I think it's a division between a mostly-objective "craft" and a mostly-subjective "intent/purpose/audience." What the story is trying to do, and how well it does it.
(To use Rent as an example, if they had cut out the karaoke-video scenes and solved all the other problems I had with it, there would still be people laughing at the pretentious faux-boho people).
If the story pushes all your buttons emotionally, so that you don't care or even notice if it's badly crafted...that's fine. But they aren't entirely separate either; doing a thing superlatively well can make me like it even if I normally wouldn't.
Anyway, that's not the main thing that I wanted to talk about.
When I've noticed these flaws, and thought about them, the one thing that is consistently true is that there is no easy fix. That problem is in place for a reason, and removing it would create another problem. A story has to be in service of dozens of things: continuity, plot causality, realism, character, theme, emotional tone, structure, and so on. And sometimes you arrive at a point in the story where you can get a really awesome, resonant climax, if you throw out logical plot continuity. Or you find that unless your story ends with the character doing nothing to solve his own problem, you'll undermine the theme. Some will say that there's an easy an obvious answer there; and there are genres that don't care a lot about logical plot continuity, and genres that don't care a lot about conventional emotional affect in crises and climaxes. But I think that real competence in craft means making sure that all those layers you've got to deal with don't undermine each other and don't work at cross-purposes to one another. And sometimes that means that you'll have to take the whole story apart and put it together from scratch. (I think Rent suffered in part because the director was not willing to do this; adaptations are hard).
It requires, I think, a great deal of persistence and imagination; and you can see why more people don't do it.
(To use Rent as an example, if they had cut out the karaoke-video scenes and solved all the other problems I had with it, there would still be people laughing at the pretentious faux-boho people).
If the story pushes all your buttons emotionally, so that you don't care or even notice if it's badly crafted...that's fine. But they aren't entirely separate either; doing a thing superlatively well can make me like it even if I normally wouldn't.
Anyway, that's not the main thing that I wanted to talk about.
When I've noticed these flaws, and thought about them, the one thing that is consistently true is that there is no easy fix. That problem is in place for a reason, and removing it would create another problem. A story has to be in service of dozens of things: continuity, plot causality, realism, character, theme, emotional tone, structure, and so on. And sometimes you arrive at a point in the story where you can get a really awesome, resonant climax, if you throw out logical plot continuity. Or you find that unless your story ends with the character doing nothing to solve his own problem, you'll undermine the theme. Some will say that there's an easy an obvious answer there; and there are genres that don't care a lot about logical plot continuity, and genres that don't care a lot about conventional emotional affect in crises and climaxes. But I think that real competence in craft means making sure that all those layers you've got to deal with don't undermine each other and don't work at cross-purposes to one another. And sometimes that means that you'll have to take the whole story apart and put it together from scratch. (I think Rent suffered in part because the director was not willing to do this; adaptations are hard).
It requires, I think, a great deal of persistence and imagination; and you can see why more people don't do it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
27/11/05 14:36 (UTC)