This is via Suzy Khimm over at WonkBlog. I hate Mondays, not because they are the first day of the work week, but because the Sonoma County Library is closed on. Happy Monday.
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Daily Archives: 26 Mar 2012
The Stone Golem
The Brothers Bloom is a mess of film. And yet, I own it and watch it a bit. It is the kind of film that is better on DVD because of all the stuff that comes with the film. In particular, it comes with almost 40 minutes of deleted scenes. As is often the case, the best stuff was left on the cutting room floor. What’s more, the deleted scenes show an original that is far richer and more complex. I can see why they cut it as they did. Even in its original version, the film was a mess. Why writer/director Rian Johnson didn’t see that his screenplay desperately needed at least one more draft, I can’t say.
And yet, the film is filled with some much that is wonderful, I’m glad it was made. There are two scenes that really stand out. The first is the opening of the film that tells the story of how the bothers started on their life of crime. It is narrated in verse and can be seen on YouTube. The second stand out scene is not in the film. It is very simple. The Curator, played brilliantly by Robbie Coltrane, tells the story of the death of his daughter and the stone golem.
I’ve been checking for the last year to see if anyone had put this scene on YouTube, but I guess no one could be bothered. It may be that the scene speaks more to me than to others. Certainly no one I have shown it to has thought as much of it as I do. I love story telling and this is just one man telling a story. But what a story and what a telling! So I went ahead and put it on YouTube. Enjoy!
Here is the text:
My daughter used to travel with me, when she was very young. And I showed her the places and the pictures, all the most joyous and terrifying things in the world. But you know: but of all the paintings in the objects d’art, she loved to hear… She would ask to hear the story of the stone golem. From the painting in a small private collection on the island of Icaria. Yes?
Well, like most monsters, the golem was once human. A boy about your age. And one day the boy was walking home and he quarreled, he fought with a very good friend of his. And they were very, very angry, and his friend pushed him a certain way. And the boy fell and struck his head and he died. Well, the boy’s friend was very frightened. So he pulled the body into a quarry, and hid the boy beneath a pile of large stones. Well, years went by and the boy’s friend became a young man. And one day, while he was drinking in the village, which, in his guilt, he did rather a lot of, he heard that a well was to be built near the forest from the stones in the quarry. Well, he ran to the quarry. He ran, and when he got there, he found there was almost nothing there. No rocks and no body. So, he ran to the well where the masons were completing their work. Had they seen anything unusual in the quarry? No, they had seen nothing. “Only stones,” they said. And they left him standing there alone, looking into the well as the sun went behind the mountains and the twilight set the whole world in a still, deep silence…
It’s 19 years to the day since my daughter died. She was six years old and she went out to play and she disappeared. [Sighing] And we found her the next morning. Down a stone well. You know, I climbed down to help her, but I slipped and I broke this leg. And while we were waiting for the rescue services to come and pull us out, she died in my arms. Shaking and crying. Her last seconds on this Earth were filled with terror for a stone golem.
This is the first painting I acquired, you know. And I keep it, maybe hoping that one night, the golem will come for me.
Story Spoilers
I prefer to know the plot of a story before I read it. There are a couple of reasons for this. On a visceral level, I don’t like uncertainty; I like to know where I’m going. More important, however, is that on a professional level, I’m pretty good at anticipating plots. So when I’m reading a novel for the first time, it is like a puzzle; I’m trying to figure it out—match wits with the author, so to speak. This has certain benefits. It makes me hyper aware of each thing the author does and why he does it. But it isn’t exactly fun and it stops me from losing myself in the story.
If I know the plot, I am better able to get inside the characters. I enjoy my time with them. And I’m able to evaluate the story on a broader scale. All of this may explain why I have never lost the child’s interest in watching the same film again and again. I do the same thing with short stories. I do it with parts of novels—I’ve read certain chapters of Don Quixote many, many times. But I don’t think I’ve ever read a whole novel more than twice; I don’t have the time or reading speed for that.
It turns out that I am not alone in this preference. Two scientists at the University of California, San Diego have published a paper in Psychological Science titled, Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories.[1] Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld write in their abstract:
[P]eople’s ability to reread stories with undiminished pleasure, and to read stories in which the genre strongly implies the ending, suggests that suspense regarding the outcome may not be critical to enjoyment and may even impair pleasure by distracting attention from a story’s relevant details and aesthetic qualities.
I would go further. Consider the following story:
A man wakes up late. He’s in a panic. He quickly dresses and goes to the kitchen where he finds his wife, in her dressing gown, leaning against the sink in the dark. He asks her why she didn’t wake him. She tells him they really need to talk. It unnerves him, but he has to get to work. He grabs some coffee and runs out the door. As he is unlocking his car, a truck comes around the corner, hitting and killing him.
I think that story has a surprising ending. The story implies some ominous confrontation between husband and wife that will hang over the day. But instead the guy is killed by a random occurrence. Surprising, boring, and completely lacking drama.
One of the hardest things about writing fiction is creating an ending that makes sense without being boring or obvious. But more and more, stories end satisfyingly rather than surprisingly. Consider the film The Sixth Sense. Most people find the ending of that film quite surprising. I know I did. And yet, if that were all it was, it wouldn’t have been good. I’ve seen it a half dozen times. What brought me back was the sadness of the film. The first time I watched it, I was focused on the boy. Every other time, I was focused on the husband and wife.[2]
Tim Parks wrote an excellent article in The New York Review of Books called Why Finish Books? In it, he makes the case that reading a book is a certain experience and when we’ve had enough of that experience we ought to stop. He further suggests that we get over our childish obsession with equating finishing a book with accomplishment.
I think this is excellent advice, even if I find it hard to follow. Friends of mine have told me how they skipped certain parts of novels—the technical chapters in Moby Dick, for example. And I’ve always been horrified. It seemed to me that I wasn’t reading the book if I skipped even a word. In hindsight, I was deifying the writers. As a writer now myself, I know how silly that is. Part of a story may seem boring to me because, well, it’s boring. Writers are not perfect, especially the great ones.
My current novel is fundamentally about a guy trying to figure out who killed his girlfriend. The plot is very much like the kinds of things Scott Turow writes. But I’ve been wondering why the book goes on a ways after we find out who the killer is. And I think I now know. I could write a plot summary in a couple of paragraphs, and you might find it clever—or not. But the ending would have no emotional impact, even though the ending is poignant; it would definitely make me cry. However, the only way it works is if you sit with the main character the whole way through and get to know him. The only way I know to trick you into doing that is to create a clever plot. But if you stopped reading the book halfway through, you would have gotten the experience that is most important: meeting my character.
Often novels annoy me. I want to know how they end, but the book doesn’t seem worth it. If the book is a blockbuster, I can turn to Wikipedia for a summary. Of course, this is useless for me, because I don’t read blockbusters. Wikipedia does not have summaries for the vast majority of novels, because, you know, most Wikipedia users don’t read novels other than the Harry Potter books. (But just look at all the summaries of movies!) So I slog through the book to find out how it all turns out, even when (Especially when!) I figure I already know.
Is that any way to appreciate a novel?
[1] I heard a couple of news stories about this late last year. It sounds like something I would hear on NPR or read in Ezra Klein’s WonkBlog. But I don’t know. There is a very easy video introduction from ABC News, but I didn’t get it from them.
[2] I am disinclined to reveal the ending, because it is fun to have that experience. However, knowing that there is a surprise ending is enough of a spoiler. And some people don’t even need that. My mother, a master of plot deconstruction, had it nailed within 5 minutes.