David Herman said something that I found rather provocative in the article that we read for this week. At several different points in the article he essentially makes the claim that stories shape the systems we have set in place for understanding emotion, if I’m understanding him correctly, which I think I am. His exact phrasing is, “Stories do not just emanate from cultural understandings of emotion but also constitute a primary instrument for adjusting those systems of emotion terms and concepts to lived experience.” (255-256) Towards the end of his essay he says, “…we cannot even have a notion of the felt quality of experience without narrative. ” (256)

I find these claims fascinating. To a certain degree this is a case of the chicken and the egg, what is a result of what, are emotions a reaction to stories, or conversely are stories told in an effort to replicate emotion. This concept is something that has been on my mind since early this summer when I watched the series premier of the AMC show Mad Men. The main character of the show, Don Draper, is sitting at a restaurant with a potential client for his ad agency. The client says that she has always wanted to fall in love. Draper casts the notion of love aside saying something to the effect of, “Love is a creation of people like me (ad men) to sell products.” This was a particularly arresting statement, especially because I had never really thought of my emotions as being social constructs. I actually hadn’t thought of my life experiences and emotions as anything other than organic.

However, being forced to confront the possiblity that my emotions are actually social constructs that have arisen as the result of stories told to me by parents or other forces in my life has made me confront exactly where emotions might be coming from, especially in an age of mass media. The truth is that emotions are packaged for consumption by mass media, and I use the word “packaged” deliberately because emotions are sold to us in the form of films, songs, and other forms of media. I don’t think that the matter is as simple as emotions are being utilized to sell products, I think it is more that we are being sold products by being told how to feel and what certain emotions (like love) are supposed to feel like.

This has really made me wonder what the consequences of Herman’s assertions are, especially in light of recent technological innovations that have made media (and by extention narratives and sales) an even more fully integrated aespect of our lives.

While reading JJ Murphy’s book this week I tried to think back on all of the screenwriting manuals I have had to read over the course of my life. I was able to come up with six, excluding Murphy’s. I might as well have read only one because as I thought back on it they were all really pushing one core concept: you have to have an story that is engaging, and these are the steps to ensure that it will be engaging. It is so frustrating for me when I write because story is rarely the most interesting part of a film, it is the characters and their interactions that are always paramount to me. As a result these are the films that tend to attract me. I recently re-watched Steven Soderburgh’s breakout film, sex, lies and videotape and one of the striking things about that film, especially when viewed in the context of the readings on character and dialog (and independent film), is how easily you can sum up the story: an old college friend moves into town and as a result complicates all sorts of relationships. That’s it. But that isn’t what makes sex, lies, and videotape a wonderful film. What makes it a wonderful film are the character’s Soderburgh populates his storyworld with and the ways in which they interact with one another. I think it is telling that a film like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford can sum up its story IN THE TITLE(!), and yet the film is still engaging on so many other levels.

To a certain extent, screenwriting manuals are just doing their job. Their job is to tell you how to sell a screenplay, and their formula (presumably) works. Screenwriters generally don’t direct the films they write, so it is difficult for them to follow through on a screenplay that is “execution dependent” to quote Murphy. Still, though, for screenplays to privilege story above all else means the relegation of engaging characters or dialogue to the screen.

As I understand it, the authors of these screenwriting manuals were inspired to write many of these manuals because they saw films as moving away from telling stories, and so they came up with ‘principles’ upon which a person could construct a halfway decent story. The problem is that the pendulum seems to have swung in the opposite direction. The film market is saturated with films that fit into the neat, little three-act structure, but are populated with characters you couldn’t care less about, and these characters are given dialogue that inspires (!) you to jam a freshly sharpened pencil in your ear. Hopefully more books like Mr. Murphy’s will be assigned in screenwriting classes and we might see big studios tossing out films that look, sound, and feel more like independent films.

I feel like I should come clean about one thing before I begin this post: I love Stranger Than Paradise and I think that Jim Jarmusch is one of the great directors living today. One of the things that I love most about Stranger Than Paradise is how Jarmusch recognized a serious impediment to making a traditional film (a lack of money) and used that impediment to his advantage by adhering to a very strict set of creative restrictions (self contained scenes, consisting of a single shot from a stationary camera), thus making the film seem rather experimental, especially considering the norms of American filmmaking at the time, which seemed to be stuck in this somewhat awkward period between the end of the New Hollywood and the bombast of the Bruckheimer/Simpson films that were to come in a few years.

One of the simple strokes of genius of Jarmusch and Stranger Than Paradise is how much back story is told through mise-en-scene. We touched on this briefly in class, but I think it is an aspect of the film that is worth revisiting because so much is said about Willie, Eva, and Eddie simply by things like the furniture in the apartment, the brand of cigarettes they smoke, the clothes they wear, etc. The reason the mise-en-scene is important and able to give off so much information has to do with the long takes that Jarmusch was “forced” to use. The pace of the film is such that the audience is able to take in all of these details and infer, perhaps not consciously but infer none the less, about the lives and back story of the characters. Jarmusch’s style of storytelling in general, but in this film especially, doesn’t pay much mind to the back story of characters. He seems to prefer to simply allow them to exist on-screen and allow the audience to infer what they are like when the audience isn’t directly interacting with the characters.

I use the word ‘interacting’ deliberately because Stranger Than Paradise really forces the audience to interact with the characters on-screen. The audience is forced to create this back story using the mise-en-scene as their guide. The audience is forced to infer what happens to the characters when Jarmusch cuts to black after every scene. In a way, Jarmusch provides the audience with such a limited narrative they are forced to create a ‘narrative’ for themselves. In writing about it, I think that is where the film’s majesty comes from, in forcing the audience to do so much work you create a relationship with the characters that really are at the film’s core. You cannot be a passive viewer, or if you are you miss out on the subtleties of one of the pillars of independent film.