Writing Duality
One of the reasons I’m so drawn to James Joyce is that he is the perfect embodiment of a writer’s ego. He held himself in high regard and yet continually believed he was a failure. He explores this conflict throughout his writing career, dotted with characters with lofty hopes and crushing dreams. Gabriel, in “The Dead,” is consumed by the feeling of coming up short, agonizing over how he is perceived by the party guests–whom he mentions are less educated than himself. And in the end he feels alien even beside his own wife, after she tears up over a former love.
This is the best way I can sum up the mental activity involved in the writing process, to view ones writing as genius one minute and then utter garbage the next. I have often mused over a scenario where a serious and intensely dedicated stint at writing would make me mad, and even my mild projects feel close to inducing a nervous breakdown. Trying to finish a first draft feels like walking across a field of broken glass. You might as well run across or your stuck bleeding to death in the middle.
I read this same torture in some of John Keats’s works which are filled with the burning passion popularized during the romantic period. Keats goes on and on about literary subjects that are so beautiful that he may die. And dying is supposed to be a good thing. He writes in a letter to his beloved Fanny, “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”
The romantics were obsessed with the concept of the Sublime. They fawned over it so much that today it is mainly used as a positive term, but it once meant something a bit more sinister. If a thing was sublime, it was a terrible thing, but something so terrible that it was beautiful. It was a thing that moved the viewer to great emotional heights. Yes it all sounds a bit emo. The sublime darkness of a storm, swirling in a violent wind of torment, swallowing up the earth.
The current version of this is what I’ve heard called the beautiful ugly moment. Contemporary writers insert these instances of sublime to play with expectations, making a bleak scene more compelling by finding beauty within it. It amazes me how many times Cormac McCarthy can describe the grey wasteland of “The Road” and have it convey something different every time, and have some of those times be quite aesthetically striking. McCarthy likens the world to a charcoal sketch, swirls of grey, sheets of grey. The dead, ashen landscape seem to be very much alive for the downtrodden narrator.
Postmodern writers have a tendency to both subscribe to and throw away conventions. Good things happen at funerals and Christmas is filled with trauma. They comment on old standards by turning them on their head and they make these contradictions live in the same moment. Something as simple as imagery turns into a conceptual conflict.
There are two sides to every story, so the phrase goes. A writer’s mind is filled with contrary thoughts that seem to find a chaotic harmony on the page. If one thinks about something as long as an author does then one starts to see all the angles–and you start to second guess everything. This behavior breeds conflict, the perfect method for plot production with a byproduct of egotistical turmoil.
National Anthems in Film
In my long tradition of being consumed by obscure subjects, my fascination has recently zeroed in on national anthems. Listening to the songs themselves is quite pleasurable, especially given my fondness for choruses, but they grow much more powerful when a crowd of patriots are there to sing along.
My obsession may have been sparked by the film “Invictus.” The post-apartheid South African Rugby team had spent most of the film merely mouthing the words to their new national anthem until the world cup when the captain, played by an accent donning Matt Damon, passes out the lyrics for the team to memorize. They embrace a new national identity at the end of the film and sing their hearts out in a swelling of pride and Hollywood romanticism. The contemporary version of South Africa’s anthem is a very beautiful song, made up of multiple languages, the lyrics gathered from several different songs. And to see actual footage of it performed in front of real citizens, reveals pride indeed.
Similarly, the Star Spangled Banner is depicted as bringing people together in multiple films, but these scenes are meant to hold your attention amid the chaos of the plot. Immensely proud of their anthem, and the high degree of difficulty needed to sing it, American’s stop everything they are doing to listen, sing along, and hold their hands to their hearts in a pause preceding or proceeding the crazy happenings about them. Sometimes this is for comedic effect, as in “Christmas Vacation’s” rocketing Santa scene, or the purpose is to instill a calm before the storm as portrayed in “Dark Knight Rises” just before a football field collapses.
This ominous use is most often how the Russian national anthem shows up in American films. Still recovering from Cold War era films where the Soviet Union was a very common enemy, movies still use the “cut to Russia” transitions that are heralded by the Soviet era and later anthem. It is strange that the proud theme of one country could invoke a sense of danger and auster alienness for those in another. In “Rocky IV,” the two fighters size each other up, in “The Hunt for Red October” the singing introduces the beginning of a delicate cat and mouse game, and in many a spy movie, the chorus warns the undercover hero to be cautious in enemy territory. Each anthem has been a very powerful symbol for a country not to be taken lightly.
But perhaps the most powerful and memorable use of a national anthem I have seen, was in “Casa Blanca.” While Lazlo tries to make a deal with Rick for the papers of transit, they overhear German singing. As the Nazi officers crowd around a piano the entire bar of refugees and French countrymen stare at these would-be conquerors who, by this point in time, have attempted to stomp out and displace entire cultures. Lazlo walks over and tells the band to play “La Marseillaise.” With a nod from Rick, the band plays and all gradually join in until the officers are drowned out. They strain to keep singing under the weight of emotion, with tears in their eyes. That is the power of a song, the strength of a people’s identity. And the anthem becomes a rallying cry calling on people to defend their very way of life.
Nerdy Pursuits 