Chip vs Subtext

The next draft of my Metlab script has just left the building – a relief really, as the temptation is always to tinker with it some more (one of my stranger ambitions with the new draft was to bring it in dead on 90 pages – I got to 94 – good enough for the moment). I’m not even going to hazard a guess as to how many times I had to re-write the first 30 pages – this ‘making it up as you go along’ lark is not good for one’s mental health. Next time out, I’m outlining all the way.

Metlab aside, I’ve been pondering recently about subtext:

Subtext is content of a book, play, musical work, film, video game or television series which is not announced explicitly by the characters (or author) but is implicit or becomes something understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds. Subtext can also refer to the thoughts and motives of the characters which are only covered in an aside. Subtext can also be used to imply controversial subjects without specifically alienating people from the fiction, often through use of metaphor.

That’s from Wikipedia, and is all well and good, but what happens when a subtext is so submerged it takes determined efforts and discussion from viewers to unearth it? For instance, this is from an essay by Bill Blakemore on The Shining:

The Shining is also explicitly about America's general inability to admit to the gravity of the genocide of the Indians - or, more exactly, its ability to "overlook" that genocide. Not only is the site called the Overlook Hotel with its Overlook Maze, but one of the key scenes takes place at the July 4th Ball. That date, too, has particular relevance to American Indians. That's why Kubrick made a movie in which the American audience sees signs of Indians in almost every frame, yet never really sees what the movie's about. The film's very relationship to its audience is thus part of the mirror that this movie full of mirrors holds up to the nature of its audience.

I’ve used this quote from Umberto Eco before, but it seems apt enough again here, that the novel is a machine for generating possibilities. That’s partially what I love so much about The Shining – on the surface, it’s a masterful horror film. The various subtexts, however, provide so much more – there’s even a theory (posited by David Kirkpatrick) that The Shining can be viewed within a Marshall McLuhan subtext. I’m not so sure about this as the argument is a little laboured, but even so: there’s nothing to say they’re wrong, which is part of the beauty of subtext, in that it provides an entertaining battleground for ideas.

The only problem with subtext as far as I’m concerned is that it’s incredibly difficult to submerge it adequately without it either A) sinking altogether (so that no-one notices it), or B) making a huge song and dance about it (and when that happens, it’s not really a subtext any more). Where subtext informs a theme to such an extent as it (allegedly) does in The Shining, then it can be incredibly difficult to pick apart the filmmaker’s intentions (which is always part of the fun of course). But in a script, how far do you push it? Subtext will always be submerged to a certain degree, but if it falls off a reader’s radar altogether, you could argue that you haven’t done your job. Make it too obvious, and you risk it clanking about like a gawky teenager in a suit of armour - and no-one wants that.

All of which means: I love subtext, but I find it very difficult to strike the right balance. How about you?

Full Metal Jacket – Structure-A-Go-Go

This post contains spoilers for Full Metal Jacket and Hidden.

I’ve always loved Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, so when I had to choose a subject for my MA 'effort' a few years back, it was a pretty straightforward choice. My title? The Use of Visual and Narrative Symmetry in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Catchy, eh? (OK, probably not). Rather than reproduce the whole thing here (and believe me, if you read it you would thank me a million times over), I thought I’d go over a few of its points just for the sheer fun of it...

First off, there is an excellent Kubrick resource here – it doesn’t look as if the site has been updated since 2002, but as far as on-line resources go, you can’t beat it. However, the one thing it doesn’t seem to cover in its discussion regarding FMJ is just how completely obsessed with structure this movie is – not just in the screenwriting sense of the word (where 'structure' usually means three acts, i.e., set up, conflict and resolution), but in its visual and narrative constructs as well.

I don't think it matters whether you regard FMJ as possessing two acts or the more traditional three, it is immediately apparent that the film is split into two very distinct halves – the Parris Island boot camp and the second part which takes place in Vietnam itself (which in fact is an abandoned gasworks in North London). Other than the apparent switch in location, the two halves of the film have very distinct visual identities: the Parris Island segment is ‘clean’, symmetrical, ordered. In the Da Nang segment, this symmetry has all but disappeared. The tension of the first act has almost completely dissipated and the film almost appears to drift, as if it is in search of a suitably involved narrative.

Some critics identified this as a major flaw of FMJ, but I think this is the whole point of the film. The Parris Island segment is structured around the figure of Sergeant Hartman, who stalks the boot camp within a variety of almost perfectly symmetrical shots. When Pyle kills Hartman, this pivotal figure is removed from proceedings altogether, and the ambience of the film drastically changes. To my mind, Hartman is the structural ‘core’ of the first part of the film, inasmuch as his words and actions provide meaning and organisation to what the recruits are experiencing. With Hartman dead, meaning and order evaporate, leaving the recruits to fend for themselves – hence the decidedly marked visual differences between the two halves.

There was a Kubrick interview in Newsweek around the time of FMJ’s release in which Kubrick stated that his intention with FMJ was “to explode the narrative structure of film”. Kubrick did this in FMJ by using structure to literally break up the narrative to the extent that the traditional notion of character is subsumed by structure itself. For example, the parade ground sequences demonstrate the rigid structure that the Marine Corps imposes on new recruits. Watch Pyle as Joker assists him in many aspects of Pyle’s basic training – initially, Pyle doesn’t get the hang of things at all. These sequences are shot from right to left, and show Pyle effectively going backwards. When Pyle starts doing better and responding to Joker's attentions, the sequences shift to left to right. In the first half of the film, character is expressed partially via the way that entire sequences are constructed. It’s probably the reason why FMJ has such a weird, unsettling ambience – the more formal elements of filmmaking have been brought to the fore, whilst the more traditional staples of narrative and character development are stripped back, leaving a film that is almost the diametric opposite of Platoon’s trite ‘war is hell’ message.

One of the most useful things I took from FMJ is that by suppressing or entirely doing away with the more commonly articulated elements of narrative, you can create space for interesting questions to be asked – a potentially far more intriguing state of affairs than the current obsession with McKee’s Story. Look at Michael Haneke’s Hidden – where a character’s ‘arc’ often describes a journey from non-awareness to enlightenment, Hidden does the opposite – a supposedly progressive liberal discovers that at the core of his being lurks an unpleasant, reactionary conservative – Georges’ ultimate reaction to where his ‘journey’ takes him is that he is more than comfortable with the way things are, a state of affairs that threatens to endure with the film’s famously cryptic and interminable closing shot.

All of which is very long winded way of saying that there can often be more to structure than meets the eye. The problem with discarding major narrative building blocks is that you’d better have something pretty compelling to put in their place, otherwise your script will look like an exercise in form for form’s sake – something that Last Year in Marienbad comes dangerously close to becoming. Alain Robbe-Grillet talks about his intention with Marienbad to "construct a purely mental space and time – those of dreams, perhaps, or of memory, those of any affective life – without worrying too much about the traditional relations of cause and effect, or about an absolute time sequence in the narrative." It all depends on the sort of script you want to write, and the types of themes that you want to explore.

Hare Puts the Boot In (Or Does He?)

Genre has almost destroyed cinema. The audience is bored. It can predict the exhausted UCLA film-school formulae - acts, arcs and personal journeys - from the moment that they start cranking. It's angry and insulted by being offered so much Jung-for-Beginners, courtesy of Joseph Campbell. All great work is now outside genre – David Hare

I’m not quite sure what Mr Hare is on about here: does he perhaps mean that ‘formula’ is destroying cinema, rather than genre? In that case, I agree, but 'genre'? I think Dave's got a screw loose. I mean, Stanley Kubrick was an immensely talented writer and director, but certainly someone who almost exclusively made genre films. I think what Mr Hare meant to say is that the application of formulae has almost destroyed cinema. And besides, I don’t think that Joseph Campbell had the film industry in mind when he wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces, so perhaps it’s a little unfair to single him out for particular criticism.

Far be it for me to make heretical suggestions, but maybe if The Hours had been made with an eye towards a consideration of genre, perhaps it would have been a little more entertaining.

Fun with Narratology

In yesterday’s Times, right next to a demolition job on Death Proof (Tarantino’s latest effort), there’s this from Pete Daly. Bearing in mind Lucy’s latest series on Structure, the only advice that Pete gives is that your movie should have a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order (nice to know that things haven’t really changed since Aristotle, although Philip Larkin did paraphrase this slightly as “a beginning, a muddle and an end”).

Although there are opposing views to this, I guess that this piece of ‘advice’ is a good starting point for anyone looking for a wider discussion on structure.

That said, I think I’ll follow the debate over at Lucy’s for the time being. The problem with me and structure is that I can only think in terms of specific examples, and not from an overview perspective at all (which Lucy does so brilliantly). I might post some stuff on Full Metal Jacket at some point, which can certainly be said to have a beginning, middle and end, but it achieves this in what is in effect a two act structure. In addition, I think that Full Metal Jacket is a film completely obsessed with structure, not just in its narrative, but also in its visual style and thematic concerns as well.

Anyway, my word for today is Narratology.

Pip pip!