(and a free movie review)
I really disliked the movie ‘Far From Heaven’. There were a couple of reasons why (for one, I’m as tired of the assumption that the white professional guy is always the bad guy as I am of the use of Arab or Central American cannon fodder in action movies), but the overall reason was simple: I didn’t believe in any of the people, and it was a human drama. I almost believed in the Julianne Moore character, but I felt like I could see the strings dangling from the puppeteer’s hands above, trying to animate her and everyone else in the film.
One of the features I see in bad writing is the fact that the characters exactly fit the page (or screen); one of the things that I like in showing a good character (I’ll use Julianne Moore in Magnolia as an example) is that they are bigger than the screen, that they are more complex, that what we are seeing is not the whole person but a facet of them, a slice through their life.
Hemingway has the famous dictum that authors should write a chapter about their characters and then pull it out and throw it away, to create space in the character’s life that isn’t seen on the page.
In FFH, I didn’t get that feeling about any of the characters. Each was simply there to advance a plot point or demonstrate a theme in the movie, never to take a natural breath. Dennis Quaid was there to demonstrate the hollowness of the Man In The Grey Flannel Suit while Dennis Hasbert was the Noble Savage, simultaneously beset and preternatural in his calm control.
I’ll leave FFH by pointing out that if they had eliminated the anachronisms and left the structure of relationships the same…but made them more subdued, more in keeping with the likely reality of how closeted gays and interracial couples (surprise, there were both in 1950’s America) really acted, the tension of yearning of the characters real feelings would have been offset by the structure of convention and societal disapproval in ways that we would have believed.
And because we would have believed in the characters, we would have felt the impact much more strongly.
But instead, we were presented with simplified ideas of characters, people rendered down to an essence designed to further the thematic and philosophical bent of their author.
Similarly, in much political and philosophical thought, people are reduced to one- or two-dimensional caricatures, and the complexity of the work is similarly reduced.
This is partly just a basic human characteristic, because people tend to fit what they see into what they already know. When participants in the ‘shoot/don’t shoot’ study below saw a black man carrying a cell phone, they ‘knew’ it was a gun, and responded accordingly.
We understand the world, I’ve come to believe in pattern and narrative, and it’s difficult at best for us to adopt new ones. But the patterns are inherently reductive of the true richness and ambiguity of much of what happens. So we get stuck when the world throws up facts that don’t comfortably fit into our preconceptions. I ‘knew’ my Republican co-worker was conservative, ‘knew’ that he had strong feelings about racial issues and policy in the U.S., and so when I met his (African American) wife I had a stunning moment where I had to watch my carefully created ‘story’ about him and race collapse.
In politics, we do the same thing. We expect our leaders to be simple paragons, our issues to be neat, internally consistent and bounded, and facts as they unavoidably come to light to fit into the neat models we’ve made of the world.
We’re wrong.
We have to stop expecting and start seeing, to stop trying to fit messy, complex, breathing people into neat pigeonholes that will advance the narratives we’re trying to impose on the world and our fellow human beings.
Now I know that this may be seen as dangerously close to the perpetual European diplomatic quest for ‘nuance’. It’s not.
It’s a desire to find a way of talking about politics that doesn’t have the shallowness of a bad movie.