Captain Marvel, In Review

Women are too emotional to be good leaders.

Surely you’ve heard this statement before—or, more likely, you’ve heard other statements or seen other behavior that is less blatant but still stupidly sexist. It’s a misconception that’s played with in the latest installation of the Marvel Universe saga—Captain Marvel, staring Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law, and a cat (four cats, actually) named Goose.

From a classic film studies/film critiquing perspective, Captain Marvel is mediocre. Uneven or lacking characterization, visuals that rely too much on CGI to be compelling, a storyline chocked full of plot holes and vague themes. But to be honest, these critiques could be applied to most of the Marvel Universe films. In fact, it has almost become a staple ingredient of their formula—an in-joke of what the strong of MU movies are. They revel in their seeming flaws. They allow themselves space to have fun, to be for the present rather than worrying about posterity.

And, the quality of a MU movie can’t be decided by an individual film alone. Rather, more important than individual characterization or plot arc is taking into consideration the system of films as a whole. Each MU film is judged by how it fits with the other films in the network of MU films, and how it fits with (or complicates) its current cultural context. It relies on references, cultural symbols the target audience will understand. These films are Events, first and foremost. They can’t be judged in quite the same way as an indie film that premiers at Sundance.

Under these qualifications, Captain Marvel soars. You can’t separate it from its context as an event—it is a teaser for what we’re all waiting for, Avengers: Endgame, the afterword to Thanos’s gut-wrenching upset victory. We’re waiting for the good guys to win again. We’re waiting for reasons to root for the good in the face of so much chaos and hate.

Captain Marvel gives us the crumb that whets our appetite. Like the serials of yore that used to play in movie theaters in weekly installments—Flash Gordon, Tarzan the Fearless, Dick Tracy, etc.—Captain Marvel is the next link in the chain, establishing a context for the next installment of the series.

Plus, it plays with the erroneous, but culturally invasive, idea that women are too emotional to be good leaders.

Jude Law’s character Yon-Rogg and the being known as the Supreme Intelligence continually admonish Carol, Captain Marvel, to control her emotions. Emotions are discounted as weaknesses, ways for your opponent to take advantage of you. In the context of nostalgia that MC and Disney movies foster, of course such suppression of emotions isn’t encouraged by the film itself. By the end (spoiler alert, though you could probably see this coming from the moment the issue is raised), Carol learns to use her emotions rather than suppress them. They become her greatest source of power.

The movie is overly self-aware of its feminist themes, and at times seems apologetic for having the first female lead in a MU movie. Still, I think such self-awareness is better than the alternative—framing Captain Marvel through the pesky lens of “the male gaze.” Captain Marvel does its job. It links the gap between Ant-Man and the Wasp and Avengers: Endgame. It builds suspense for the coming Event. It apologizes for sexism in MU superhero culture and offers a new alternative. Plus, the movie is fun. Scenes of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury and the cat Goose offer good comic relief, and Carol’s origin story fits into a clear origin-story plot formula—so we know what’s going on. Instead of focusing on tangled but intellectually engaging plot structures or deep characterization with philosophical dialogue, with Captain Marvel we can simply let our emotions engage with the film.

If you dabble with writing poems, one thing you’d learn is that the form of the poem will teach you how to read it. The same idea is basically true with movies. The first ten minutes or so will teach you how to watch the rest of the film. Captain Marvel is a film, like so many stories of this era, dripping with nostalgia, extremely self-aware, and unable to be completely judged or understood without its networked context.

Watch Captain Marvel to get amped for the next Avengers movie, or to see a kick-butt woman superhero, or just to see Goose the cat. It’s a fun film that fits right into its storytelling era. A fun film with a great soundtrack to match.

Happy screening!

—CFH

The End of the Tour (2015)

For me, author David Foster Wallace was a revelation, a fresh new voice and style both hyper-intelligent and down-to-earth, an almost-parody of the academic-speak I suddenly became surrounded by in my first year or so of college. I could relate to his anxieties, his drive for distraction and escape, the ever-pressing need to succeed in this quick-paced and commercialized modern world—yet this need matched with a burning desire for peace instead. I know now that lately his legacy has been mildly under attack. He is cast off as the writer for pseudo-intellectual upper middle class, heterosexual, white males. At times, he acted in a way contrary to our #metoo sensibilities. Like many whose identity comes with privilege, he gave too little notice to minorities and underrepresented voices in his work. Rarely does his work contain a thought to racism, sexism, or homophobia—and occasionally even dark, cruel jokes about these matters.

But yet, when I was a freshman in college and first picked up his work, his voice left me laughing, pondering the universe and humanity, thinking deeply about the pressures of modern life. In other words, despite any glaring flaws I now see in his writing concerns and personal life, at the time his work made me feel less alone.

A few days ago I watched the film The End of the Tour, about writer David Lipsky shadowing David Foster Wallace for a Rolling Stones profile at the very end of the book tour for Infinite Jest. I appreciated the lens through which this film viewed the writing life. So often, movies about writers follow the same pattern—the writer is down on their luck but hopeful, then something happens and they seem bound never to write a solitary word again, but finally they find their muse and succeed in the form of publication, fame, money, the entire world on a string. It’s the literary form of a boxing movie plot—except you can practically see the ego-maniacal film writer behind the scenes, living out their dreams vicariously. Don’t get me wrong—I like these movies. They’re inspiring. They center around the question: why do you write? An important question to ask any writer, sappy possible answers regardless.

The End of the Tour is not exactly that movie. Yes, it touches on many of the same themes, even brushing the Why You Write question. But its focus is on a different end—after publication, after the tour, after the hype. The silence after the storm.

Because to tell you the truth, you get a very different answer to the question of why one writes depending on when you ask it in a person’s career and life.

You also get wildly different answers when you ask someone why they read.

What The End of the Tour grapples with in a compelling and self-reflective way is our biggest literary/artistic world myth. The Legend of the Tortured Artist. Unlike other films tackling this theme—Birdman (2014) and Whiplash (2014), for instance—The End of the Tour is less onscreen-intense. It doesn’t have to be. Unlike these other tortured artist films, this film just existing carries an extremely somber weight. David Foster Wallace passed away by suicide in 2008. He was still a young man, still with plenty to say and give to the world as an author but also as a human being. When watching the scene in The End of the Tour, when he goes to watch a movie in the theater, as he stares entranced at the fiery explosions and macho violence onscreen, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge, a pang. 2008 was only eleven years ago now, only seven when the film came out. Mostly likely, I thought illogically, Wallace could and should be alive to watch this movie about himself right now.

The End of the Tour made me feel guilty. It made me feel how I’d feel watching a hologram concert of Amy Winehouse or Prince. The film made me confront these feelings within myself—so I’m not hating on the movie. Not exactly.

What does trouble me is the way we build up and cling to our illusions of people. The way we can’t as consumers just consume the art. The way we crave presence and performance. We need drama—something to talk about, or whisper about, or shout about, depending on our level of perceived morality. Since this is history, I don’t feel too bad about giving you a spoiler from the film. The film ends with the end of the tour—Wallace’s tour, on multiple levels—but the beginning of a new one. David Lipsky, the author who profiled Wallace for Rolling Stone, writes a wildly successful book about Wallace. Whereas in the beginning of the film, Lipsky’s fiction book reading was sparsely attended, in the end at his reading event for the Wallace book the reading is packed. People are cheering.

Lipsky had been down on his luck, but hopeful. His career seemed stalled, and he seemed bound to never write a solitary word again—or at least to be widely read. Then, he found his muse.

He wrote a book about the Tortured Artist, then got a movie for it.

I felt sick, finishing this movie. I think I was supposed to. The End of the Tour is about American exploitation at its most insular. The film itself is not bad or wrong—the culture around it is. Or perhaps what I think of as “wrong” is simply natural. Writers and artists create to heal their wounds, or at least to show them to the world. All of us, on some level, are hurt. And all of us, on some level, long for success, however we define it—forced to be okay, at the end of the tour, with exploiting that hurt for our own and others’ gain. Perhaps celebrity worship culture is simply a by-product of that—a world where sacrifices must be made for art.

But the truth is that I don’t really believe that. Not at all. Because the truth is that for every David Foster Wallace and even every David Lipsky, whose stories are told in widely read books and widely seen movies, there are hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands whose stories are never told, or never heard. The End of the Tour makes you think about this, too. It makes you wonder—why these guys? Obviously, they’re straight white males. Educated and talented. Those qualities gave them a leg up. Though not every straight white male with education and talent gets lucky. Or, “lucky.”

Most of all, though, The End of the Tour made me ask—what went wrong? How did our culture get such toxic definitions of success, the idea that success can only happen if someone is celebrated to the point of worship, then torn down to be talked about and dissected? I don’t have an answer for that—just vague musings I came up with while trying to sort through the somber sense of destruction I felt after finishing The End of the Tour.

I feel now like these toxic definitions haven’t changed and aren’t changing. And that disappoints and frustrates me.

And it disappoints and frustrates me because I think they can be changed. I just don’t think it starts with pointing fingers, tearing down institutions, or even telling stories of destructive and self-destructive people. I think the real change starts when we look at ourselves. When we reflect on ourselves deeply and critically. When we ask ourselves why. Why do we write? Create? Explore? Work? Fight? Live the way we do?

Change begins when we ask ourselves those questions, but, more importantly, when we begin to change the way we answer them.

—CFH

The Mule, in Review

A few years back there was a flurry of rumors flying around my smallish Texas hometown. According to the ever-anonymous “they,” Clint Eastwood himself had stayed the night at our Holiday Inn while scouting filming locations for his upcoming movie.

Was The Mule the movie he was searching our pastures for? Or had he not been there at all—and his much-whispered-about sighting had been nothing more than typical Waxahachie, Texas star-struck fantasy?

Either way, The Mule was made. On the surface it’s a typical old guy fantasy narrative right up there with the neo-Western TV show Breaking Bad, in which the gritty old crabby guy manages to become a politically incorrect but lovable Robin Hood. In between the lines, the film’s about Clint himself, a guy who believes in beauty and doing things his way despite the updated culture and wide-ranging world-views very different from his own. And like in Breaking Bad, The Mule ends tragically or at least semi-tragically, but without the inevitability of consequences that some overly-serious so-called tragedies exude. No—in The Mule, Earl always drives his fate. He decides to face his consequences. He decides not to use his age or desperation as an excuse, and he refuses to ever be labeled a victim.

The Mule is definitely an old man’s fantasy and an old man’s movie. Especially cringeworthy in our current political climate were the scenes of Earl at the cartel leader’s party, dancing (and too much more) with women about the age of his granddaughter.

At the same time—as a woman about the age of Earl’s granddaughter—I found myself identifying with Earl. Or, rather, not identifying with him so much as identifying, maybe, with the target audience—I found myself playing along with this masculine last hurrah fantasy even as I acknowledged the ridiculousness of it. In the movie, Earl is some sort of botanist. He says the flowers he cares for are beautiful and worth his attention because they only bloom once. Of all the interesting themes and threads The Mule raises but never completely ties together (and the ones it raises and then beats like a dead horse), this one about the flowers blooming only once, so being worth it, was the thread that stuck with me the most.

What the heck is that statement supposed to mean, both to the world of The Mule and to my world, our world? Was it an idea similar to the great fish rotting, un-applauded, at the end of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea? As a writer, I of course thought first of my own work—my fiction and poetry I’ve spent countless hours on only to have it barely glanced at when published, as if it only blooms once, and that once makes it worth it whether people applaud it or not. I wondered if that was the message Earl (and Clint) was trying to get across—that your accomplishments are your own.

Only, that doesn’t fit completely with the other themes of The Mule—especially the theme of family.

When Earl finally isn’t a distant jerk and shows up to help during a family crisis, he tells his long-estranged daughter that he regrets not being there through the years. To show her forgiveness for this, she says he’s just, “a late bloomer.” That one time showing up, being caring, makes up for Earl’s lifetime of distance and hurt. Maybe this is an old, white man’s fantasy—he can be an ass and then later ride in, regretful, claim to have changed, and be accepted back into the fold. Or maybe it’s simply a human’s fantasy, hoping in the lonely, lost moments for one last shot at redemption.

The Mule is all about redemption, all about change and changing for good. It’s not a masterpiece by a long shot, but I found its earnestness and even its old-fashioned integrity interesting and refreshing. Is it possible to redeem yourself with one right turn? As someone hurt by people, I certainly don’t think so. And as someone who has hurt people, I certainly hope so with all my heart.

The message of The Mule—or the central speculation of it—is that, despite all, people are worth your patience. If you keep caring for them and waiting on them, one day they just might bloom into something beautiful.

—CFH

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) Review

—CFH

Book Club in Review

When you get free tickets to see a movie, sometimes you take chances and see something you never would have thought you’d like. Because of my work, I ended up with a free ticket to watch the movie Book Club, starring Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen as four longtime friends who decide to read Fifty Shades of Grey for their book club. As you probably can imagine, plenty of ridiculousness and corniness follows as these older women begin reflecting on their lives and love lives—I although the material is pretty lowest-common-denominator, this movie manages to still be thought-provoking and entertaining. Mostly because of the extraordinary talent of Diane Keaton and her co-stars and a screenplay with great knowledge of its target audience, Book Club is one of those movies that’s just fun to watch.

I had assumed Book Club was an “old person movie” and had left it at that. But really the film is genius in how well it knows its audience—and because it isn’t trying for much more than entertainment (though it has plenty to say about aging, romance, sexism, families, and being a individual trying to navigate this increasingly digital world), it ends up working even if you don’t necessarily get every reference and even if you’ve seen and heard the corny romances and dirty jokes before.

And, boy, can Diane Keaton act. For me personally, she was my favorite part of this film. The way she moves and expresses herself is just so naturally funny—the talent she displayed in Annie Hall and Manhattan still shines in Book Club. Her charisma holds together the narrative, giving us a clear main character to focus on even though we get caught up in the plots of all four book club members.

What impressed me most about the film was what it said through the gaffs and rosy plotlines. This movie makes some serious statements about how society treats the elderly and women. After the Diane Keaton character’s husband passes away, her daughters pretty much treat her as an invalid, as someone frail and used up with no more life to live. The daughters instantly assume (like I assumed that this film wasn’t for me) that a woman can’t take care of herself after a certain age and without a stable man. While watching the film I worried about the future of the daughters, so dependent on each other, their husbands, and their mother, but more so—and more dangerously—dependent on traditional ideologies that didn’t grant them any agency in society, especially the older they get.

Book Club is chocked full of wisdom and humor. It’s a surprising hit, a feel-good movie that’s perfect for one lazy summer day. If you watch it for no other reason, watch it for the comic acting genius of Diane Keaton. Watch it to think about aging, identity, and how to find personal agency while still finding love and companionship.

Although I managed to see it for free (except of course I caved and bought popcorn), Book Club is well worth the money.

—CFH

Reflections on Isle of Dogs

A week or so ago, I went and saw Wes Anderson’s new animated movie Isle of Dogs at the Conway Cinemark one lazy Sunday morning—the perfect time to take advantage of the cheap early bird ticket prices and lack of crowds. It was a beautiful day, the ground damp from light showers earlier in the morning, the sky bright blue except for a line of gray clouds gathering in the distance—the Weather Channel app predicted storms around three, though I hoped to be back home by the time they hit. I settled into my seat in the back right of the theater just as the lights dimmed and the commercials began. I was excited. Call me basic, but I’ve always loved the strange literary-ness and composed mise-en-scene of Anderson’s films—and I’m always rooting for a native Texan—but Isle of Dogs would be the first of his movies for me to see on the big screen.

Plus, who doesn’t like dogs?

The story is set in a near-future fictionalized Japanese city called Megasaki. The mayor, Mayor Kobayashi, is determined the get rid of all dogs by sending them to Trash Island off the coast of Megasaki. Kobayashi’s ward, a young boy named Atari, flies to the island in search of his lost dog Spots. The rest of the movie is the search for Spots, with plenty of subplots and complications involving the mayor’s crooked politics and a gang of five other dogs trying to survive on the island.

If you’re a Wes Anderson fan, you won’t be disappointed by this movie. The stop-motion animation is visually interesting, and the story is imaginative yet deeply human, brimming with throwaway quirks—such as the haikus and the symptoms of “dog flu”. The movie is literate and engaging. Despite the boy Atari not being to speak English, I found myself emotionally drawn to his story.

The deepest character and protagonist was the dog Chief, voiced by Bryan Cranston. A lifelong stray, he is struggling to preserve his freedom while at the same time hoping to find a place where he belongs. Chief’s struggle is one that many of Anderson’s characters grapple with, from Royal Tenenbaum to Steve Zissou to Mr. Fox to Zero in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Chief’s struggle isn’t all that unique from those other characters. In fact, one of the main drawbacks to Isle of Dogs is that there simply aren’t that many interesting characters that take risks as far as characterization goes.

Or, rather, there are too many interesting characters, and not enough time spent with any of them. They are glossed over, left looking interesting but lacking real human depth. The gang of dogs captured my attention—and then their storyline gets forgotten as we focus on Chief growing attached to Akira. There’s a suspenseful subplot of government conspiracy (that could have gone into being social commentary, but this is a Wes Anderson movie, so nah), but the mayor and his entourage aren’t fleshed out enough for us the audience to understand their motives. Why would anyone want to persecute dogs? It feels like there has to be an easier get-rich-quick scheme than the elimination of an entire beloved species…

The biggest character disappointment was the girl Tracy Walker, voiced by Greta Gerwig. Issues of “the white savior” character notwithstanding, I found her character interesting. But I have always found it annoying that Anderson creates such tantalizingly complex and strong female characters, only to have them exist on the periphery of a male character’s story. In The Royal Tenenbaums, I wanted to know more about Margot.  In Life Aquatic, I wanted to know more about Jane and Eleanor. In The Grand Budapest Hotel, I wanted to know more about Agatha. These are not the empty-headed females of many male screenwriters—they are great characters with engaging stories in their own right.

As a Wes Anderson fan, I hope one day to see a Wes Anderson movie with one of these spirited females in the lead.

And I hope that he takes more risks in his next picture, continuing his experimenting with the film form instead of falling into the trap of simply cranking out movies that match his already established style.

All in all, Isle of Dogs is a Wes Anderson movie. It’s visually beautiful, quirky, and imaginative. It’s also neglectful of good female characters and in denial about cultural issues. But every film does not exist only to make a statement. Isle of Dogs is for people who enjoy Wes Anderson’s style—and it ignores pretty much everyone else.

I myself enjoyed it, as I always enjoy the strange yet relatable worlds Anderson creates.

—CFH

The Realism & Joy of Ready Player One

I haven’t yet seen the soon-to-be released movie Ready Player One, but I did spend the last few days reading Ernest Cline’s novel. Keeping in mind the last film theory essay that I summarized on this blog (read it here), I wanted to read the book so I could then compare it to the Spielberg-directed movie once it came to a theater near me and once I could scrape together the funds for the movie ticket and some popcorn. I’m sure the movie is going to be great—and since Cline himself co-wrote the screenplay, I’m sure it’ll try to stay as true as possible to the book—but I’m just as sure that because of the different mediums, no matter how true the story is to the book the movie is going to have huge differences.

This post is basically a Ready Player One appreciation post. I loved the book and I hope that the book itself doesn’t get overlooked by the movie.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a fascinating, fast-paced read. Set in the near-future, in 2044, the book follows teenage Wade Watts, a.k.a. Parzival, as he tries to find a hidden prize in the virtual reality world called OASIS. Although a great deal of the action happens in virtual reality, there are plenty of real-world consequences for Watts as he tries to get the prize—which includes billions of dollars and control over OASIS itself. What I loved most about the book was not just the tight plot or the plethora of pop culture references, but was also the fresh imagining of our future. Dystopian futures seem to be a dime a dozen at this point, and although Ready Player One is far from presenting a completely happy, utopian view of how our society will progress, the future presented in the book is one not without hope and human joy. New technology such as virtual reality is not evil, but is instead the avenue through which society and humanity will continue living and advancing. And, at the same time, the book argues that although virtual reality is not evil, it is also not reality—and, at its best, it pushes people back out into reality, into the joys and struggles of their actual lives.

The book also challenges the shaming that goes on over how people use their time with technology. There are hundreds of news stories citing doomsday statistics about tech addiction and how many hours people spend on their phones or social media or playing video games. There are sometimes stories about the craziness of people meeting online and falling in love in virtual realities. And there are hundreds if not thousands of memes shared online about the self-consciousness of people who spend a lot of time online.

At this point in our history, our culture does not value time spent online. Instead of focusing our energy on how to create a productive online atmosphere, so far we’ve been more interested in shaming people for spending time in the online realm which is, supposedly, “not real.”

But, as seen in Ready Player One, time spent in video games and the internet and in virtual realities IS life—or at least part of it. Online, people make friends, form connections, have typical life experiences, learn new things about themselves and the world, fall in love, etc. So why is that deemed “not real”? Feeling self-conscious and shamed about spending time in an online or virtual reality realm is as crazy as feeling self-conscious and shamed about spending time in any place on Earth different from where you actually live. Virtual reality worlds are really like any physical place—and going there is like going on any vacation. Stuff that happens on a vacation is completely real, completely important and meaningful.

And at the same time, no matter how meaningful, a vacation should re-energize you and push you back into your home, your actual reality.

As our society shapes and reshapes around the new technology and the Digital Revolution, we’re going to have to change some of our misconceptions about reality. I loved Ready Player One because—through detailed world-building that can only really be asserted through written text—it portrays a complex relationship with reality and technology that speaks just as much to our world today as how our world might be in 2044. These technologies aren’t going anywhere—so these types of subjects and complexities are stuff we need to be thinking and re-thinking about. So now I can’t wait to see the movie, even though I’ll probably be one of those people who read and loved the book annoyingly saying, “That’s not how it happened!” to everything in the film. Still, the story itself is worth the watch.

And I hope you’ve decided that the book is worth the read.

—CFH

Summary of “What Novels Can Do that Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)”

About the essay & author: Seymour Chatman (August 30, 1928-November 4, 2015) was an American film and literary critic, a giant figure in the study of narratives and Structuralism (see last summary on Screened for more info about Structuralism), and he was a professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkley. “What Novels Can Do” was published in Critical Inquiry in Autumn 1980.

Summary of the essay: The essay begins with a brief discussion of narratives and narratology. “Narratology” comes from the French term la narratologie and means the study of narratives. Narratology has taught us that narrative has its own independent structure no matter what medium is being used to convey the narrative. Chatman describes narrative as “a kind of text organization.”

“… narrative itself is a deep structure quite independent of its medium.”

Narratives have a “double time structuring.” That means that narratives always operate with and in two times—the time sequence of the plot (“story-time”) and the time when in the text those plot events are presented (“discourse-time”). No matter the medium, these two different times are independent in the text. (And “text” throughout the essay could mean written language, films, comics, etc.) The essay then goes into how narratives are adaptable—they can be translated into different mediums. For example, Cinderella has been used and reused in ballet, opera, film, comics, and so on. Although so far most narratology has focused on how narratives are the same despite the medium in which they are presented, this essay begins to discuss how each medium—especially the written word versus film—works differently when presenting the same narrative.

“… any narrative can be actualized by any medium which can communicate the two time orders.”

Chatman brings up description in novels and short stories—big chunks of written text in which “the time line of the story is interrupted and frozen.” He gives an example of Maupassant’s story “Une partie de campagne” and contrasts the written description with the same setting as presented in Renoir’s 1936 adaptation. In the written text, the number of details are limited, and the reader expands on these details through imagination. In the visual text, there are many more details—but the details are not asserted by a narrator. Since the details are not brought, in a limited way, to our attention, we only focus on them if they relate obviously to the plot and what might happen next. Chatman anticipates some counterpoints to his argument, such as the “camera eye style” of writing and close-ups and establishing shots in film, but says that the difference is still that in movies the sense of continuing action doesn’t stop. He also claims that in establishing shots story-time is not suspended like in written description, but rather that the story has not yet begun.

“… narrative films do not usually allow us time to dwell on plenteous details.”

Chatman returns to another Maupassant descriptive passage and brings up the point that written words can be evaluative as well as descriptive, such as with the adjective “pretty.” With these words, readers will bring their own notions to the written text, but will know that whatever is being presented is “pretty.” However, in film, the audience has to be in agreement with the filmmaker to reach the same evaluation. Everyone has different notions of what “pretty” means, and when asked to describe with words something or someone presented in a film, we might not all come up with the word “pretty” even if that was what the filmmaker intended.

“… film does not describe at all but merely presents.”

Another difference between the two mediums is how a narrator or speaker in a written text can reveal a lot about him or herself and larger society and setting by what he or she is saying. Chatman claims that the camera cannot invoke tone in the same way. In film, the visual point of view cannot be escaped, while in a written text the author has more freedom and flexibility. The filmmaker can invoke emotions and subtleties in the narrative visually, such as through camera placement—creating stagelike “planes of action” and giving us the emotional point of view of characters, making us identify with them—and “reaction editing” that can, without speaking or asserting, give us light commentary on what’s happening in the society onscreen.

“Once that illusory story-time is established in a film, even dead moments, moments when nothing moves, will be felt to be part of the temporal whole…”

Although film and written texts can convey the same narratives, with film the narrative’s underlying messages are more abstract while the plot is emphasized, and with written texts the plot can be paused and de-emphasized while things are described and commentary is asserted.

“So writer, filmmaker, comic strip artist, choreographer—each finds his or her own ways to evoke the sense of what the objects of the narrative look like.”

Why read this essay? I picked this essay to summarize because we have some big adaptations coming out right now in the movie world—A Wrinkle in Time and the soon to be released Ready Player One, for instance. Since movies began, filmmakers have been making films out of “proven” narratives that had previously been bestselling or classic novels or short stories. But despite how proven the narrative, some adaptations are better than others. This essay helps to understand some of the reasons why—and it makes you think about how narratives and different artistic mediums function.

Want to read this essay for yourself? Go here.

—CFH