Watch this trailer. It launched a thousand ships at Sundance. Though at the time it went by its original (and very unsightly) title of “Push: Based on the Novel by Saphire.”
“The harrowing film won both the Audience and Grand Jury awards in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, as well as a Special Jury Prize for Mo’Nique’s performance as the unbearably cruel mother to Precious Jones, an obese, illiterate girl struggling to survive growing up in Harlem.” (Hollywood Insider)
There was substantial conflict between The Weinstein Company and Lionsgate shortly after Sundance: both parties claimed to have closed a deal for domestic distribution rights to the indie. They filed dueling lawsuits, which will undoubtedly drag on until theatrical revenues come in. At Sundance, the film’s producers negotiated a very favorable deal with both, and finally closed with Lionsgate (they say) at “north of $5 million.” Southern black comedian and Hollywood wunderkind Tyler Perry (know that name) and Oprah Winfrey have joined forces to help with P&A for its theatrical release on November 6 (cough, award season, cough).
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. - Thomas Jefferson
“The truth will set you free. Not: the truth will make you happy. Not: the truth will please you. Not: the truth will confirm your prejudices. The truth will liberate you; set you free; …the truth will set you free and piss you off; you will be freed and angered…for no other reason than that your notion of freedom is so tiny, so limited, so restricted and cramped. Do you think “freedom” is about making choices? Or about “choosing options”? Really?”
This quote from an unfinished homily by Fr. Philip Neri Powell was brought to my attention by the good folks over at The Guild Review. I choose not to engage religious themes on this blog, however I was struck by the zeal and eloquence of Fr. Powell and I liked the above passage. I like that it blasts the idea of “choice” as being freedom. I think that an excellent story reveals how our choices actually lead us to greater or lesser experience of freedom.
I’d like to juxtapose this with another quote that struck me as equally zealous and eloquent in Dave Egger’s new book You Shall Know Your Velocity.
“I wanted synthesis and the plain truth– without the formalities of debate. There was nothing left to debate, no heated discussion that seemed to progress toward any healing solution. I wanted only truth, as simple as you could serve it, straight down the middle, not the product of dialectic but sui generis: Truth! We all knew the truth but we insisted on distorting things to make it seem like we were all, with each other, in such profound disagreement about everything– that first and foremost there were two sides to everything, when of course there were not; there was one side only, one side always: Just as this earth is round, the truth is round, not two-sided but round and–” – Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Your Velocity.
Perhaps this is why the Truth can piss you off – because it is so slippery, multivariate, three-dimensional and subjectively perceived.
In response to comments on recent posts about the shallowing of Hollywood stories, I would claim that it’s better to have a purely entertaining story than a story that tries to communicate “truth.” I say this because preachy stories ring hollow, which is worse than shallow. Having no doctrinal religious convictions myself, I can understand how some people are turned off by a story that ultimately communicates “truth” as religious doctrine. Everybody experiences truth in different ways, with different vocabularies of experience and metaphor. If your Catholic stories and vocabulary communicate truth very well for you, then that is very well and good. If your Hindu vocabulary of myth and ceremony communicates truth very well for you, then good. However, to try to teach a new vocabulary of religion and a new belief about the world is too much to communicate in a movie. For this reason, for a story to communicate to a wider audience, it must speak with the vocabulary of the audience’s common experience. Universally human stories set within a realm of experience shared by most everyone in our culture have much more impact and truth-revealing power than the vocabulary of a specific religious tradition.
Some people bemoan the lack of “purpose” in Hollywood’s latest stories – and this is indeed a symptom of trying to appeal to the greatest common desire: to feel. But for the majority of people who have not cultivated an intellectual discipline for investigating philosophical matters, feeling is the primary avenue to understanding what life is all about. And maybe this is the most human avenue to Truth; Hinduism calls the path of loving devotion bhakti. Catholic mystics have tried to communicate divine revelation through poetry and allegory. An unmediated, immediate feeling about truth is perhaps better than trying to express inevitably half truths in black and white syllogisms. By taking us into the life of a character, we can experience vicariously the confusion, the exhilaration, the catharsis. Stories have the ability to shake our preconceptions of how the world works. A good story operates on an intellectual level and an emotional level – it can change our worldview and adjusts how we feel about certain things. If it is well told (good script and production quality) it enhances the effect, hitting us with the Aristotelian rhetorical trifecta of logos, ethos and pathos.
There is such a fine line between making a truth-claim while keeping a sense of wonder. A good story allows us to warm ourselves near the glow of something beautiful without trying to possess it, thus limiting it within our own capacity. It’s not easy to courageously make a truth claim while still being in Keatsian “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable grasping after fact and reason.”
I’m not so quick to turn my nose up at pop culture. Perhaps there are a lot of things going on beneath the surface of a pop song or a blockbuster movie – simply dive into the “why” of its popularity. Things have widespread appeal because they hit at something universal (and yes, sex and violence are universal human experiences as well). I don’t like to take sides against stories that hit at the sensitive nerve of society and stir controversy. They are not necesarily more true or untrue. I believe that they are valuable in that they spur dialogue and thought. Even Dan Brown. Any thoughts on Angels and Demons?
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. - Thomas Jefferson
How does what we do affect what we can understand? This question came to me very insistently while I was taking in some art at the Prado this weekend. This question could frame some really good character contrasts – two characters with very different backgrounds and life choices encountering the same dilemma. The story could start with two characters reacting in different ways to the same situation – one way seemingly shocking and bad, the other reaction seeming good and appropriate; but after further development we come to understand that what seemed bad is really good and what seemed good is really bad. This is not suggesting moral relativism. It is merely the examination of appearance vs. reality. The putting on of dramatic appearances – the creation of a dramatic play, a TV show or movie – ironically reveals what is most real. Playing with how things appear can reveal how they really are.
As the NYC subway quote says that Isaac Newton said,
“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
EDIT:
OK, no more late night posts. This above is incoherent and unfocused. I guess it deserves the following answer. Interestingly, the post fed to my Twitter and the question was “answered” by somebody at Mahalo Answers. I guess they periodically answer questions on Twitter. (Mahalo.com is a cool idea, by the way! Microtransactions will drive the web of the future, says I.) If you ever have a question just twitter it to @answers.
Its a process of continuous learning from the senses, mostly by trial and error. You do something, in the company of something, then it influences your thoughts, ideas, and wishes, and changes your attitudes, feelings, and outlooks.
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