The Movie Effect

How movies have changed writing

The Great Divide

In the latter part of the 19th century European avant-garde writers began to turn away from telling stories. In the early 20th century narrative itself was being taken apart and re-examined by James Joyce among others. At the same time, in America D.W. Griffith was making extraordinarily popular movies by relying upon the traditional (now ‘bourgeois’) storytelling techniques.

The movies continued to follow Griffith’s lead, and partly as a result of this, and partly as a result of the inherent immediacy and power of the motion picture medium, movies became the dominant narrative art form of the 20th century.

There’s a difference in the writing of storytellers who grew up watching movies, and those who didn’t. Storytellers who grew up on movies tend to work in images, and they string together sights and sounds. They work in the language of the movies, in ‘scenes’ and ‘sequences’ and they try to add to the immediate, concrete nature of the movie-going experience a glimpse at the interior subjective experience of their story’s characters — something that the movies have a hard time doing.

Storytellers who grew up on books and oral stories, and rarely if ever saw any movies, work by contrast in words. There is a subtle but profound difference here.

To give a small example: when a movie-influenced talesman wants to bring his audience from one location to the next, he may rely upon an image to form as transition. But a talesman who grew up apart from movies will use a word to make that transition.

A movie-influenced talesman is ‘seeing’ his story unreel before his inner eyes, and he attempts in his words to depict in the inner eyes of his audience a similar movie-like experience. The predominant appeal is to visual and aural experience. There is an emphasis upon concrete action, though it is usually coupled with an extreme subjectivity. (This subjectivity might be an attempt by the talesman to offer his audience something that movies cannot do well, or it might be an expression of a greater cultural subjectivity in general.)

The Result

Nowadays, just about everybody has grown up on movies or their sister television. So just about every talesman works in this movie-influenced manner, and just about every reader expects to read movie-influenced tales. The practical result is shown in such modern fashions as the dictum, “Show don’t tell,” which I see in just about every textbook teaching writing nowadays, as a sort of universal gospel. But storytelling is all about telling, and while a movie can ‘show’ a written work can’t — we can only tell.

As a result of this internal contradiction, today’s talesmen fight against the greatest strength of their art. Of course they are telling tales, but they work deliberately to conceal this telling, and to kill the narrator.

The Dead Narrator

A dead narrator is a poor one. Some talesmen substitute a character inside the tale for the narrator, and write in the first person. The usual technique is a covert or hidden narrator: scenes are written as though experienced by one of the characters in the scene, in the third person. This is as close to the subjective cinema as written tales can get. ‘Serial narrators’ or Point of View characters is a method the modern writer uses to show the whole tale from different points of view. Each scene is told from some witness’s point of view, and in this way the writer can tell us about scenes that his main viewpoint character doesn’t experience. This is more like a semi-subjective cinema, though it isn’t used much in film, and is instead what modern writers have resorted to in trying to adapt film technique to written tales.

Usually this takes more words than the more-efficient overt narrator or voice of the talesman himself.

(Composed on keyboard on and before Tuesday, March 11, 2008)