More Than It Seems

How objects are charged with emotional power

What I am about to describe is a technique that has its proper place in drama — in mime, dance, the theater, and movies. It was a hallmark of the theater in the 1900s, and D. W. Griffith brought it into film. It is very powerful when used well — which is to say, subtly — because it compresses a range of emotions and associations into a single, wordless moment.

I am unsure how strong it is in tales told in words, where the talesman uses words anyway.

Associations in the Mind

The technique depends upon a trick of man’s mind. This is the trick: when we experience some strong emotions, we tend to associate the emotions and the event with the objects involved with them.

An example would be books. Many ardent readers, when asked if they would ever see books dying, to be replaced by ebooks, say Never — that they just couldn’t see themselves ‘curling up’ with a computer screen the way they do with books. Here these readers have in the past read many compelling tales in books, and have come to associate the pleasures those tales afforded them with the physical objects, the books, that contained the codes and symbols that carried the tales to them.

Another example lies in the strange twists of sexual fetishes. Freud found that some of his ‘deviant’ clients had been spanked when they were boys, just on the verge of puberty, by their pretty young governesses; these boys came to associate the stirrings of lust they felt for their governesses with the rather intimate act of spanking, and when they grew of age, would ask their wives or whores to spank them; indeed, some of them were unable to achieve satisfaction without the spanking.

Ancient tribes would carve figures to represent their gods and spirits; they would later come to believe the gods and spirits dwelt in those figures. In the Greek Orthodox Christian sects, the painted representations of saints are thought to contain some part of the saint, and to be holy in and of themselves.

A beloved father wears a certain cap daily for the last 20 years of his life; after his death the children and widow can’t look at the cap without thinking of the dead man, and keep it on its peg on the wall in the entry to the house. Whenever they pass it they feel a twinge of loss for the dead, and a bit of the complex of emotions they felt for him.

Another kind of association comes in the form of gifts. Here we associate the gift with the giver. This is very common in the form of love tokens.

Another association can be with pieces of things. A brick from the fallen Berlin Wall becomes treasured as a memento, and brings back memories of the long division of that city. Someone close to us gives us a present; here the object has no association with the giver other than that he gave it to us; all the same we feel a bit towards the object as we feel towards the giver. For instance, some gifts are ugly and impractical; we never would have chosen them for ourselves; we never would keep them — other than for the fact that some close kinsman or loved one gave the things to us, and to discard the things would somehow betray disrespect toward those who gave them to us.

Associations on Stage

This is exactly the same mechanism in the drama. It probably began when a playwright depicted in his play a similar kind of event — say, the dead father’s cap. This proved very effective; there were many in the audience who could sympathize with the situation, and many who had experienced like associations in their own lives. From this point, the technique was repeated, varied, and explored in its many possible representations.

Here we can see how powerful such a ‘charged object’ can be on stage (and in movies). The scene depicts the parlor and entry of the family house; there on the peg on the wall by the door hangs the cap, symbol of the father who has died. It may stand in as a reminder of the good times that are gone; it may stand in as a representation of the tyranny of the monstrous old man, whose laws and whims still rule even from the grave. It may stand in as one thing for the son, another for the widow, a third thing for the daughter, yet another for the business partner when he comes to pay his respects.

When the son, forever oppressed by his old man in life, finally tears down the cap from the wall and stamps upon it, the audience feels a shock of horror — or liberation — that runs beyond anything that a speech from the son could ever give them. The action is concrete, external, wordless, in short it is dramatic. It is also efficient because everything that the father might have been is compressed into that cap on the wall. In the middle of a speech, one of the actors can go near the door and look up at the cap — it is all we need, we know what is on the character’s mind, no matter what the words are in the speech.

Associations on the Page

So the trick of ‘charging’ an object on stage is very powerful, but how well does it work in a tale told by words, orally or on the page? In all word-tales, everything is symbolized: words are symbols that the audience must decode to understand what the matter is. The object must be told in words, so the act of tearing down the father’s cap cannot go wordlessly, as it can in life, on the stage, or on film. It is all the same efficient. But on the other hand word-tales can so easily dip into the mind of any character and tell what his feelings are even when he himself might not wholly understand them.

Associations by Fetish

Magical tales, tales of Eartherea, may use the charged object in literal ways. The cap on the wall need not stand in for the father when he is dead: it can hold his ghost, it can speak with his voice, it can issue his commands from the beyond.

This is not the same, and lacks the power of associations that we’ve covered here so far. In this case the object is something else — neither the father nor a representation of him. The totem or ikon ceases to have symbolic power when the god or spirit or saint truly does speak through it. When the kerchief given by the moralizing mother starts to choke the young man whenever he says something she would not approve of, we are dealing with something else altogether than if he merely felt that he was choking, ashamed of what he spoke when he sees himself in the mirror and notices the kerchief wrapped around his throat.

How to Charge a Thing

The trick of charging an object in this way for the audience is just the same as it is charged in life for the persons involved. The audience must see the father wearing the cap before he dies and is absent from the stage. We must see the mother give the kerchief. At the same time, the tale is a compression of life, and a play can’t go on for a year of preliminaries during which we happen also to see the father with the cap on his head, and slowly and subliminally make the connection between the two.

The briefest way to do this, is to have the characters openly acknowledge the association. The father can be dead before the curtain first rises; the family might be coming home from the funeral, and the widow with great care smoothes the cap and places it on the peg on the wall, and some words pass among the mourners about the dead man as they stand below the wall and look up at the cap; the widow might recall the day the man got the cap, and some anecdote about how much stock he put in it, how much he loved that cap. This is a rather clumsy way to do it, but it will now, with a few more subtle reminders, leave the audience seeing the cap as the dead man.

Taking a bit more time, is to have some scenes to establish the connection dramatically, on stage. We must see the father alive, cap on head. Maybe the widow-to-be would give him a new hat, which he refuses; she mocks the battered old cap, but he defends it mightily, and wears it indoors in defiance. In another case, the lover gives his girl a little toy, worthless in itself, on the night that is their happiest together, after which he goes away to war. The girl, alone, unloved, untouched, tempted by her feelings for other men, will brush her hair and make herself up at her dressing table, where the little toy hangs beside the mirror, a perpetual reminder — and reproach, if she is making up to go out with another man. Here, to charge the thing, we must see the man give the girl the toy, and it must be underlined by a couple of references; maybe we see her place it by the mirror, and see him draw her into his embrace through the mirror, with the toy hanging there prominently (a technique possible only in film). After this we might see her reading a letter from him while she sits at the dressing table, and she touches the toy, thinking of him.

Reminders such as these will help to reassert the connection even while it plays out: the effect grows as it is used.

In word-tales, all these scenes have to be described, and the feelings described as well, and the association of feelings noted in the characters. It can be done, but I doubt if it gives us as great an edge as it does in dramatic tales.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, April 10, 2008)