Everyone Has Reversals

Story Lessons, Big and Small (Warning: Spoilers!)

May 13, 2007

The X Factor

A few people who know me have asked why I haven't blogged about some recent movies they know I've seen.

The truth is, I liked them too much.


Or maybe it's not as simple as that.


Let's explore this together, shall we, virtual therapy loyal blog readers?


The movies in question are Children of Men, Little Children, Pan's Labyrinth, and The Lives of Others. Haven't blogged about a one. Loved 'em all.


I thought about blogging about genre. Or genre hybrids. Children of Men seems like a sci-fi action movie that defies some of its genre conventions (i.e., there's not a whole lotta sci- in that fi). Pan's Labyrinth: the fairy tale no child should see. Little Children seems almost genreless... how is it getting away with that? It's part satire, part comedy, part drama, part romance... it's mystifying.


I also thought about blogging on the topic of subplots that are, in fact, the movie. Little Children's love story doesn't hold a candle to its pedophile character study; Lives of Others flips back and forth between a character we hope will change, and a character we hope will succeed/survive. Which is the hero? And Pan's Labyrinth, of course, plays the traditional fantasy quest tale as a subplot to (distraction from?) the main story of battling fascism in the above-ground world.


I couldn't bring myself to write these posts, though.


When I went to write a post about a "lesson", the lessons just seemed beside the point. Why take a single lesson out of a movie that, as a whole, knocks you out?


Would doing so reduce a movie one loves to less than its whole? Is it messing with the gestalt of the thing? I'm not one of those people who believes you can't love what you carefully study; otherwise, I'd never write this blog.


And yet...


...there is a reluctance.


How about we leave it at this: each of these movies had an effect on me that lasted beyond the experience in the theatre. I was, for lack of a better word, "haunted''. I kept thinking about the film long after I'd seen it. This is so rare, and I love it when it happens.


How do you write to haunt? I'm sure I don't know. There's definitely an X factor there. I'd be a fool to pretend I knew how to create the X factor. (Or, if I did, I'd be a fool not to be peddling it in small vials by the side of the road.)


The lesson for me, anyway, is: go for broke at least once in your career. Surely the farther you reach, the likelier it is you'll hit on something truly great.

1 Comments:

Blogger annabel said...

The X factor is certainly elusive! I wonder at what point a writer knows they have taken hold of it.

7:21 a.m.  

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