Things people get wrong about movies

Allow me to throw a little crumb (perhaps a ship’s biscuit?) your way as I keep working on the next long post (which will be more ‘Young Royals’ related than the last one but feature a few other shows and movies too, I think). I always hate to keep you waiting for so long between the actual long posts. So every once in a while, I just feel like throwing a little thought your way is in order, so you don’t get too bored around here. The tiny post below will be more of an observation, really, than an analysis post, but I hope this will still prove helpful in your future movie-going and television-watching endeavours – or maybe you’ll just get a good laugh out of it because you have friends just like the ones described below, as well. Who knows…

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One of the things I keep noticing whenever I discuss films with people I know in real life is that most people actually don’t struggle all that much with recognizing a metaphor.

They can spot a metaphor just fine, and usually they will even be able to work out its meaning quite accurately…It’s just that they don’t understand what the metaphor does in the movie in the first place!

They will see the metaphor coming from a mile away. They will then pinpoint its meaning (often quite precisely)...and then they will just proceed to discard the metaphor and never think about it again while watching the rest of the film.

Which is such a shame!

Because usually understanding the movie depends on knowing what the metaphor actually does in it.

I can’t help but think that this is akin to some dogged gold panner being perfectly capable of spotting that one surprise gold nugget in their steel pan, but then, after picking it up and holding it in their calloused palm for a minute or so, feeling they just have to throw it back into the river for reasons unknown, without ever having considered the possibility of it deriving from a whole vein of gold somewhere further upstream.

Here’s why I’m actually glad we’ve just talked about the movie ‘Titanic’ (1997) in our last installment on this little blog here: It’s because it features a prime example of a metaphor just like that. A metaphor which many viewers tend to get wrong – not because they don’t see the metaphor (they do!) and not because they aren’t capable of deciphering its meaning (they are!) but simply because they don’t know what to do with this knowledge for the rest of the film, which leads to them ignoring it and hence misunderstanding the entire point of the film, its basic premise and its main message. Viewers like that (and they can very well be self-professed movie buffs) simply don’t understand what metaphors in a movie are supposed to do.

(‘Titanic’ is incidentally a film most of you will have probably watched at some point. So it actually makes for a great example when trying to explain this phenomenon.)

The following is taken from actual conversations about this film I’ve had over the years with people I know in real life (friends, acquaintances, students, relatives, etc.).

Somebody I know (let’s call them ‘The Viewer’ for the purposes of this little post or just simply ‘they’) will tell me, “Yeah, well, it’s obvious that, in his movie ‘Titanic’, James Cameron makes the ship a metaphor for society back in the era the film is set in. The ship is literally organized according to class; there are strict hierarchies, etc. Some people are literally on top and some live down below in steerage. It’s an obvious metaphor for what society pre-World War I was like. You know…the Edwardians.”

So, the person in question will actually have no trouble spotting this metaphor and working out its meaning. But then…

Me: “Yes, I agree. That’s a metaphor. And now please consider what it means that Cal, Rose’s fiancé, and so many of the other upper-class men in that movie are utterly convinced that the ship cannot sink. They call Titanic ‘unsinkable’. This clearly has a double meaning: They are both literally convinced that the ship is unsinkable, but since the ship is a metaphor for society, this also clearly means that, metaphorically speaking, these men are all convinced that the society they live in will never go under, remaining frozen in what they think is this state of absolute perfection forever and ever. So, the words ‘the ship is unsinkable’ actually have a double meaning, right?”

Insert the sound of The Viewer’s jaw hitting the floor here, please. Because at this point, my interlocutor will usually look at me with eyes as wide as White Star Line saucers and utter, “Oh, my God!...Oh. My. God. You just blew my mind. I had never considered that!”

Me: “Why not? After all, Cal says that right away.”

They: “Yes, but…he says that about the ship!”

Me: “Yeah. So? The ship is a metaphor for society. You just told me so yourself.”

They (still in a state of shock and disbelief): “You mean…you mean I can just connect what he says in the movie to what I said about the ship being a metaphor for Edwardian society?”

Me: “Well…yeah? Of course! That’s kinda the whole point of it. That’s what metaphors are actually for. You connect them to wherever else in the screenplay they are being referred to.”

They: “But…but…but…I thought this whole thing about the ship representing Edwardian society was more of a…a…a general statement, you know? Like…the author was just trying to tell us what life was like back then.”

Me: “But you didn’t call it a general statement; you called it a metaphor! A metaphor is a very specific thing, and it does something very specific in a script.”

They: “Yeah, but I thought it was only a metaphor when, you know…when the movie shows the different classes and stuff – the rich people on top of the world and the poor people down below fighting the rats and the dirt and filth and such. I thought it was only a metaphor when the movie shows us this contrast.”

Me: “No, no, no. Once a metaphor, always a metaphor. It’s a metaphor throughout the movie. It’s just that that moment with the contrast that you’ve just described was the point where you realized that it was a metaphor in the first place. But that doesn’t mean it’s just a metaphor at this particular point in the movie. A textual element usually maintains its function throughout the text.”

They: “It’s not that there was a specific moment for me. It’s just…it’s just this vague thought I had: Like…Huh? Weird! The ship is exactly what society was like in the 1910s. I just thought of it in general, more vague terms, you know.”

Me: “But you didn’t call it a vague thought. You called it a metaphor! ‘Vague thoughts’ isn’t how screenplays work. Screenwriters don’t just have these fuzzy ideas floating about in their head, that they then let drip all randomly over the blank sheet of paper that subsequently becomes their script. Usually, they have a very precise and structured mental map of what it is they want to say and what tools they might use for that purpose. Metaphors are one such tool in the toolbox, and a lot of fine artistry goes into weaving them into a fictional story. A lot of effort goes into a script like that.”

They: “Okay, but still…Aren’t you taking things too far there?”

Me: “No. When a screenwriter takes something like this ‘ship’ metaphor, this will usually mean that anything that literally happens to this ship on screen is actually also figuratively happening to the metaphor in the text. So, when Cal says the ship is ‘unsinkable’, he means both the literal ship but also metaphorically…society back then. But the ‘fun’ part is, of course, that that’s not even true! The ship can and will sink in this movie. It is far from perfect. That’s the cool part of this metaphor. It tells you that this society had to go under because it just wasn’t any good for the people having to live in it.”

This is the point where The Viewer will usually regain their wits and start to protest: “But you can’t just say the sinking is a metaphor. That sinking is a historical fact. That really happened!”

Me: “So?”

They: “James Cameron had no choice but to include it in his movie. He couldn’t just not sink the Titanic.”

Me: “Tell that to Quentin Tarantino. I’m pretty sure Hitler didn’t croak the way it’s portrayed in ‘Inglourious Basterds’.”

They: “Yeah, but you can’t do that with Titanic. Everyone knows what happened.”

Me: “And most people don’t know what happened to Hitler?”

They: “That’s not the point. You can’t just say that everything is a metaphor when the Titanic really sank.”

Me: “A good screenwriter knows what subject matter to pick. He or she will have an interest in a certain topic, yes, just like James Cameron, who has had this lifelong passionate interest in the ship’s history. But they also know what subject matter will make a good story. And a good story usually conveys more than just a literal meaning, and it employs literary devices to that end. A clever screenwriter will know how to pick and choose what they need from the panoply of actual historical facts, so that what eventually makes it into their script will become part of this huge symbolic tapestry the screenwriter is weaving. If Cameron didn’t mean to express any of this with his metaphor, he wouldn’t have had Cal specifically saying that the ship was ‘unsinkable’. He didn’t need to include this line nor the whole discussion between Mr. Andrews and Rose about the small number of lifeboats in his script. But Cameron did include it. I can guarantee you this is precisely because Cameron wanted to centre his entire movie around the idea that the ship metaphorically represents Edwardian society in virtually every context where it comes up in the dialogue.”

They: “It’s just that it breaks my brain…Do I really have to connect everything people in the movie say about the ship to this one metaphor? I didn’t know you were allowed to do that. Are all the characters then actually talking about society whenever they’re discussing the ship?”

Me: “Well…yeah? I mean, it’s only the most important metaphor of this entire movie, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t you connect it to everything else in it? It’s what the film is all about. The whole movie is called ‘Titanic’, for Heaven’s sake. That’s the central metaphor of the whole screenplay. Of course, it’s going to be connected to everything else!”

So, that seems to be a massive problem for many people. (Probably not for you, dear reader, or you wouldn’t be here. But for many, it is.) They see the metaphor. They can easily decipher what it means, but they simply don’t know what to do with it. They think it’s just some vague, general statement, and then they take the rest of the movie entirely literally, i.e. just sail on the surface of the text without ever considering connecting it to what they have correctly worked out themselves about the metaphor.

I have had this conversation, one way or another, about so many shows and movies by now that I have lost count.

Think of ‘Young Royals’, for example. Think of Hogwarts…oops, I meant Hillerska. (Yeah, easy mistake to make. But I doubt Wilhelm would be interested in riding any dragons…unless that’s a sexual euphemism I didn’t know so far.)

There are lots of people who will instantly tell you that the fictional boarding school of Hillerska on Netflix’s show ‘Young Royals’ is a metaphor for Swedish society…and then…

…they will just leave it at that!

They won’t even consider what this actually means.

Like…you can tell people that it’s funny how that school occupies a building complex we are shown throughout the show but that there’s this other building close by, too! And they won’t even react to your statement.

It’s a derelict old barrack called ‘The Palace’ hidden somewhere in the woods nearby. It doesn’t really belong to the Hillerska school campus. And yet, and yet…it just haunts the students’ imagination so often; it occupies so much of the students’ mental space. Let’s be honest: The characters on this show spend a lot of time and energy on obsessing over what does and doesn’t go on at ‘The Palace’. It occupies this peculiar space, right? Literally somewhere out in the woods, half dark and hidden away, yet somehow always present.

And while you recount this, The Viewer will undoubtedly argue, “Yeah, but…like…that’s just where this old building is, right? That’s literally where it’s located. And the students just party there and stuff.”

Me: “And the writers couldn’t have the students going wild somewhere else? At the gym perhaps? Or just simply make up some other venue and shoot that on a film set? Isn’t it much more likely that this is all part of the same metaphor? The school represents society; well, and a monarchy – ‘The Palace’ cough, cough – just isn’t really part of this society because Swedish society is officially democratically organized, so the monarchy is this derelict old thing out there in the woods…that still keeps haunting everyone’s imagination.”

They: “You mean…you’re just connecting this to what I said about the school being a metaphor for society?”

Me: “Yes! Of course. If the school is a metaphor for society, then it’s a metaphor regardless of where in the script it comes up. Just look how ‘The Palace’ is sorta, kinda part of the experience of attending this school…but it also isn’t. It’s a part of it, but officially it’s also not a part of it. It’s like this literal outhouse sullied with vomit and urine. In the past, horrible things were happening in there, we are told. Students were sexually humiliated and tortured. And while the hazing rituals were toned down a bit over time; it’s still pretty bad.”

They: “You mean…this is what the Swedish monarchy is like? It used to commit horrible crimes in the past, but it’s still far from harmless now. Oh, my God! My mind is blown. You really think this is about the monarchy in Sweden.”

Me: “You’re not listening to me. I don’t have an opinion on the Swedish form of government one way or the other. Frankly, I don’t care. I’m saying this is what the writers are saying. Clearly.”

They: “Ah…But how do you know it’s not just a coincidence about ‘The Palace’? Maybe the school being like Swedish society is more like this general statement the writers are making.”

Me: “But you didn’t say ‘general statement’. You said ‘metaphor’. I’m just repeating your own words back at you, so you understand that spotting a metaphor has consequences for how to read the rest of the script after that initial ‘sighting of the subtext’.”

And on and on and on it goes.

You can point out that Ludvig calls ‘The Palace’ a ‘fortress’ and how this probably means he feels trapped inside this royal life. You can point out that ‘The Palace’ doesn’t have any official function at this school, just like the Swedish monarchy, which is just a constitutional one and cannot legally rule over its subjects. You can point out that ‘The Palace’ plays this enormous role in the students’ lives nonetheless, how a ton of negative events constantly happen there and how all their thoughts revolve around this venue, how they cannot truly free themselves of what goes down there. You can even point out that all of the ‘initiations’ that took place there in the past are clear hints at the massive underlying story this show hides in its subtext: Simon’s backstory of sexual abuse in the past.

You can point out any and all of this, but it’s no use. People find it really, really difficult to just take the metaphor they themselves have identified (the meaning of which they have correctly worked out at that)…and just run with it! They find it difficult to think of a metaphor such as this and apply it step by step to the rest of the text.

Sometimes the conversation will also take a bit of a different turn:

I might point out to my interlocutor (just as I did above) that, in ‘Titanic’, Cal’s line about the ship being ‘unsinkable’ clearly has a double meaning (the literal ship and Edwardian society)...

…and then The Viewer will get irrationally angry with me, saying, “Yeah, but you know, the shipbuilders Harland & Wolff never advertised the ship as unsinkable. And if the White Star Line ever did, it was just, like, once in a brochure or something. They were very careful with claims like this; they specifically didn’t do that for legal reasons. Also, a ton of other ocean liners at that time were called ‘unsinkable’, too.”

Me: “That’s great. You have a degree in Titanology. But we’re not talking about real history and the real Titanic, we’re talking about a work of fiction. And in it, a fictional character calls the ship ‘unsinkable’. I’m not really interested in the question of whether the real builders or owners of the ship ever did so or not, and if James Cameron did his homework with regards to historical accuracy. If I were to guess, I’d say he knows all of this very well, but that’s not the point. He wasn’t writing a history book there. He wasn’t even making a documentary. He made a feature film, i.e. the equivalent of a novel in visual form. He introduced a metaphor, which you yourself have astutely spotted and brilliantly figured out. Well, and then the author obviously…did something with that metaphor. Otherwise why would he introduce it at all? Just to throw it in and then have it sitting there on his screenplay shelf unused? No!”

They: “You mean…everything that is being said about this ship in this movie has a metaphorical meaning?”

Me: “Not just what is being said, what is being done to it, too!”

They: “Do you actually mean to say that the sinking has a metaphorical meaning, too? That’s insane! That’s a historical fact. What else could James Cameron have done with it? That’s just in the movie because that really happened on that night in 1912.”

Me: “As I said, when a screenwriter wants to screw with history, he or she will do so, no matter what. And there’s absolutely no reason why an actual historical fact, something that really happened, cannot be used for the purposes of whatever your already-established metaphorical subtext is. If your metaphor is ‘ship=society’, then you’ll just rub your palms together at the opportunity of showing that this society was not as ‘unsinkable’ as the upper-class men on this ‘ship’ thought but that it actually did go under and then some, that it was twisted and ripped apart and then inevitably foundered.”

They: “You mean…the author uses an actual, historically accurate fact and just turns it into something symbolic?”

Me: “That’s literally the whole purpose of art, no?”

If you’ve been following this little blog for a while, then you do know, of course, that this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine: I like to go on and on and on about the fact that fiction is not reality and that works of fiction follow their own rules.

So, note that our imaginary viewer here (who is honestly just an amalgamation of many, many different people I know and have known over the years) has trouble with several different things at the same time: Keeping reality and fiction apart (also massively undervaluing both the, uhm, artistry and artfulness of art). But also: Knowing what a metaphor actually does in a movie. It doesn’t just exist, so the author can vaguely make some general political point. In a well-written screenplay, this metaphor will be played with, twisted, referenced again and again, and ultimately it will be connected to every other metaphor in the text, too.

In short, everything that touches this metaphor in the script will suddenly get a double meaning, as well.

When you already have a metaphor as massive and important as ‘Titanic=Edwardian society’, it’s, of course, no coincidence when the main antagonist of the story calls the ship ‘unsinkable’. And no, it doesn’t just mean that he thinks the (literal) ship cannot sink. It shows you something about the main antagonist’s attitude towards the society he lives in (and feeds off of). And by extension, it shows you how this entire class of people perceive this society (yes, even the more sympathetic people like the Thomas Andrews character in this movie).

And it is, of course, no coincidence that the only one who, it is at least implied, has doubts about the ‘unsinkability’ of the, ahem, ‘ship’...is a woman. When Rose gets a tad worked up over the fact that there aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone, that tells you something. And not just literally about this one single woman. This is the main protagonist after all, the character you’re supposed to empathize with. She is low-key concerned that this society could go down the drain. Her faith in this society isn’t by far as unwavering as the faith of all those men, and that’s no coincidence.

Cue the inevitable argument by The Viewer that more lifeboats wouldn’t have saved anyone because the main problem on that fateful night in 1912 wasn’t capacity; it was the fact that the crew couldn’t get the boats loaded, lowered and off the ship quickly enough. The last two collapsible boats couldn’t even be launched properly and just floated off deck (one partially submerged, one upside down). More lifeboats wouldn’t have helped; they might even have impeded the launching process and caused even more deaths.

Me: “Yes, I know all of that. But that’s not the point. You’re talking about reality again. You’re talking about what actually happened back on April 15th, 1912. I’m talking about a work of fiction…”

Then I will usually get a complaint about how James Cameron totally misrepresented the ship’s chief designer Thomas Andrews in the movie. Because that man almost certainly did not die in the first-class smoking room the way we are shown on screen. “Akshhhhually…he was seen distributing lifebelts towards the very end, trying to help people. He was very much involved with the rescue efforts. He didn’t just wait around in apathy in front of a fireplace, staring at some clock. He tried to save people. Some survivors even claimed they saw him jump off deck and swim away from the ship together with Captain Smith .”

Cue me groaning, “Fiction is not reality,” again. “The quibbling over historical accuracy won’t help you assess and analyze a work of fiction, which you should approach in the same way you do a novel. You told me yourself that the ship is a metaphor for Edwardian society. So…your turn now! Since Thomas Andrews is the character in this screenplay who built the ship. He is basically the one who built this society. So, who is he really? Allegorically speaking? Is he just Thomas Andrews? Or does he maybe represent more than just one person? Does he represent a whole concept, a system perhaps? Do you see why he has to die in the very room to which, as Rose has already pointed out to us, upper-class men withdraw in order to, and I quote, ‘congratulate each other on being the masters of the universe’. Is this filming location perhaps metaphorically important?”

The Viewer (with their mouth about as open as many of the portholes sadly were on that night in 1912): “You mean Cameron changed historical reality in order to make it fit his metaphor?”

Me: “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Writers do that all the time! Their metaphor, their message, the thing they are trying to say by means of symbolism takes precedence over historical accuracy…As long as historical accuracy doesn’t get in the way of their metaphorical subtext, they will stuff their movie with as many historically accurate details as possible – Cameron apparently went all crazy about all the uniform buttons being correct and the White Star Line logo and the right china patterns showing up on the dishes and teacups. But the minute historical accuracy gets in the way of their central (!) metaphor, it goes out the window…Cameron doesn’t need his character Andrews to die on deck distributing lifebelts or even freezing to death in the icy water. He needs him to die in the space from which this society, this Edwardian Empire was ruled: the first-class smoking room. Edwardian society goes under and the class of people that built it, the patriarchs of this society (read: Andrews) go with it…in the exact space that represents this upper class and, in Andrews’ case, with the final understanding that he didn’t build as good a ‘ship’ as he had thought Titanic (read: Edwardian society) was. He didn’t build as good a ‘ship’ as it had needed to be. And yes, the word ‘ship’ here means ‘society’. Again!…If Cameron had shown Andrews dying while distributing lifebelts, his metaphor would have broken down. We would have got the wrong idea; we would have thought that the patriarchal builders and rulers of this society were benignly looking out for everyone until the very last minute. Instead we got an image of utter shock and apathy: The system that built this society couldn’t even properly react to the catastrophe anymore once it saw society about to be ripped apart and founder.”

(Imagine me taking a sip of something strong and tasty after this long rant…Oh, no wait! Two major world religions are currently marking their respective fasting period, so in order not to tempt anyone of you lovely people out there who are fasting right now, let’s just say: Imagine me taking a deep breath after this long rant.)

The Viewer: “So, basically that one metaphor–”

Me: “…comes first. Everything else, including historical accuracy, comes second.”

You would think this is all fairly obvious, dear reader. But I swear it’s not.

Look, many of my friends are teachers. And some of them are literature teachers even. And while one of these literature teacher friends is actually really, really good at this, I do know at least one literature teacher who is really bad at it, too – precisely because he doesn’t think of movies and TV shows in the way he thinks about literature. Moving pictures can be incredibly deceptive. They look so real that many viewers (even some literature teachers) will watch them and just unconsciously take them as a truthful depiction of real life, not as works of art with their own rules and conventions.

This illusion (delusion?) tends to get even worse when the film or show in question depicts a real event from history. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that what they’re seeing is not a documentary (and even a documentary can and often will pick and choose what to show, edit scenes in certain ways, etc.).

It simply doesn’t make any sense to say, “The way Thomas Andrews’ death is depicted in James Cameron’s ‘Titanic’ is bad because that’s not how it happened.”

Feature films aren’t supposed to be quasi-live-streams of what happened!

When you’re saying James Cameron didn’t handle Thomas Andrews’ death very well because that’s not what really happened, then you’re not getting it.

No! James Cameron actually handled Thomas Andrews’ death exceptionally well because the (fictitious) death of this fictional (!) character, who acts as an allegorical personification in the text, fits the rest of Cameron’s various metaphors (plural). That’s the artistry part about the art of writing a screenplay.

And yes, the Thomas Andrews we see in the movie is a fictional character! We’re watching an actor recite lines from a screenplay, after all – not the real Thomas Andrews, who died almost 113 years ago in a completely different way.

This seems like an easy concept to grasp and yet…you wouldn’t believe how often I’ve had the conversation described above.

It’s particularly bad with Titanic fans – both nautical Titanic nerds and fans of the movie ‘Titanic’, of which I know several in person (I mean people from both groups; sometimes there’s even a bit of overlap between the two).

But you could see that with ‘Young Royals’, too: people obsessing over whether the Swedish legal system was portrayed accurately on the show when August was scared to go to prison for filming Wilhelm and Simon without their consent and similar nitpicking and accuracy quibbling.

(I have no doubt, by the way, that at some point I will get a comment underneath my ‘Titanic’ post, telling me off for saying that Harold Lowe’s boat was the only boat to come back and pick up survivors. Yes, I know, I know; it depends on your definition of ‘come back’. Walter Perkis’s boat turned around, too, but that was while the disaster was still ongoing, and the boat was very close to the sinking ship, anyway. Lowe’s boat was the only one to return later on. But yeah, I’m sure there are more details in my ‘Titanic’ post that would merit criticism from a real Titanic geek if they were to ever stumble upon it.)

The point I’m trying to make here is that many people (and especially the types of history buffs attracted to films of this kind) judge movies about historical events in the following way: If the movie depicts everything the way it happened, then it’s a good movie. The more things deviate from reality, the worse it is.

But that’s, of course, blatantly absurd. This is not the right way to judge fiction at all. This is not how you should engage with art. Ever.

Alexandre Dumas’ novel ‘The Three Musketeers’ wouldn’t somehow be a better book if the portrayals of Cardinal Richelieu, King Louis XIII and Anne d’Autriche were more historically accurate. We all understand that those are just fictional versions of the real people we know from our history lessons back at school.

Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ wouldn’t be a better play if it depicted Caesar and the entire timeline of his untimely demise in a more historically accurate fashion.

Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’ wouldn’t somehow turn into more superior literature if they depicted the Late Bronze Age Collapse in the 12^th century BC in a more accurate way. No, they would, in fact, turn into far inferior texts because most of the main characters wouldn’t make an appearance in them to begin with (let alone any of the Greek goddesses and gods or any of the mythical creatures, etc.).

Fiction is not reality. Fiction serves other purposes than reality. Fiction follows other rules. You cannot judge a work of fiction simply by counting all the (real or perceived) errors with regards to historical accuracy. You simply cannot measure the quality of a work of art in this way.

That would be a gross misunderstanding of what art actually is and does.

No, Thomas Andrews’ death in ‘Titanic’ wasn’t badly handled. It simply serves other purposes than just historical accuracy – namely, the film’s broader metaphor. And when it comes to serving that purpose, the film simply hit the bull’s eye!

Murdoch’s death in ‘Titanic’ is a similar matter. And while I can understand that the officer’s descendants were very upset when they saw that controversial suicide scene in Cameron’s movie…as a fictional scene in a work of fiction, it actually works extremely well.

Is it historically inaccurate? Probably, possibly...well, nobody really knows what went down there in those lasts minutes. It’s not even clear which of the senior officers on deck had fired those shots some survivors reported later on they had heard and seen being fired. The claim that one of these officers had then committed suicide by shooting himself rests on conflicting eyewitness testimony, too. Most likely, we will never know what really happened.

Is it tactless, is it insensitive, even offensive to Murdoch’s descendants and his memory to depict him in this way? Yes. (Cameron should have probably just offloaded that whole suicide scene to some unnamed, fictional officer. Problem solved.) But as a fictional scene, it is necessary and clever.

There are even some viewers who defend this scene’s inclusion by arguing that Cameron just wanted to visualize the enormous stress the crew were under at this point or by claiming that this suicide scene makes for good drama.

But that, too, is a misunderstanding of how screenplays actually work: A good screenwriter usually has much, much more concrete objectives in mind than just the general visualization of human emotion or the amping up of the drama factor. Emotions and drama aren’t everything!

Scenes like this have to fulfil clearly defined functions: metaphorical ones, mirroring functions, foreshadowing functions, etc.

And Murdoch’s suicide scene clearly serves a foreshadowing function (as we had already discussed in the ‘Titanic’ post itself): Murdoch literally yells, “Your money can’t save you any more than it can save me,” as he throws all that money back at Cal.

Screenwriters will typically use clear signals as to when a character acts as a mirror character for another character. This line is one such signal. (This fictional version of) Murdoch acts as a mirror for Cal here, thereby foreshadowing Cal’s own death more than 17 years later. And at the end of the movie, we do indeed find out that Cal inherited his millions, but none of that wealth could help him escape his fate: He committed suicide by shooting himself in 1929.

Murdoch’s suicide scene foreshadows that, and in that sense (and only in that one), Cameron does, of course, handle his death masterfully. This scene isn’t there to be factually correct; it simply serves another purpose in the work of fiction that is this screenplay.

What I often notice is that there are basically two types of viewers:

A) There are the ones who use (historical) accuracy and realism as a yardstick to measure the quality of a movie or show against.

B) And then there are the ones who have no problem with a filmmaker taking some artistic liberties, which they do, however, attribute to the filmmaker in question choosing dramatic effect or strong, powerful emotions over accuracy and realism.

Both types of viewers are wrong:

A) Fiction is its own thing and follows its own rules; holding it up to reality and comparing the two, thinking that this is the right way to separate the wheat from the chaff, is unequivocally wrong because this approach doesn’t even understand what fiction is.

B) Even the viewers who are more tolerant of filmmakers taking artistic liberties fail to see that that’s exactly what this is all about: It’s artistic! Not everything is about drama and visual poignancy. Screenwriters do very precise things in their screenplays; they employ very specific tools to achieve very specific ends.

Watching a show like, say, ‘House M.D.’ with a couple of friends, where one half of the people being present fall into category A and the others fall into category B, can be an excruciating and exhausting experience because one side of the room will constantly claim that ‘House M.D.’ is a ‘bad show because those symptoms are not at all how a heart condition like that presents; the medical inaccuracies in this episode are ridiculous’ while the other side of the room will keep repeating the mantra of ‘oh, well, they just needed to create a lot of drama to make this more interesting to watch’ or ‘the show runners really make us empathize with the main characters in this way by showing us what difficult choices they have to make and how strongly affected they are by it; emotion-wise this really helps us put ourselves in their shoes’.

If you’re lucky you will get a word in edgeways at some point and manage to point out that the patient in the episode acts as a so-called ‘mirror character’ for Dr. House himself and that the heart condition is no doubt a metaphor – namely, a metaphor for love, i.e. that the episode is trying to tell you that Dr. House (who is being mirrored here) has fallen in love with someone, and most likely not in a happy, fulfilled and requited way, seeing as this love is metaphorically being compared to a painful medical condition.

If the episode is a bit more complex, you can potentially even show how there are other metaphors that are intertwined with this ‘heart condition’ metaphor and how all of them taken together tell you a whole subtextual story.

And if you’re really, really lucky, your friends will then go, “Oh…So, all of this actually means something? It’s not just pretty doctors in high heels having petty arguments all day long and Dr. House making sarcastic remarks? Are you saying there is a hidden meaning here?”

And then you’ll say, “Yes. And the things you thought were either medical inaccuracies or just the characters emoting a lot…are actually very precise screenwriting tools. Because fiction is not reality, and you’re not watching a live feed from an actual hospital in real life but essentially the visual equivalent of a novel.”

Fiction is not reality, people. It does its own thing. And trying to work out what that is is actually a lot of fun.

I was chatting with my friend, the literature teacher, about this recently (he still hasn’t watched season three of ‘Young Royals’, sorry; we’re all pretty busy at the moment), and one thing he pointed out was, “It’s great that you keep telling your readers that fiction is not reality. But have you told them the opposite, too? What’s the other side of the coin here?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Reality is not fiction!” came his answer.

This might seem like a trivial observation, but it’s really not. It’s actually a very astute one, and I think we should include it in our regular blog mantra around here:

It’s not just that fiction is not reality. Reality isn’t fiction either!

What did my friend mean by this?

Stories are incredibly powerful. They hold enormous sway in our lives. We love stories, we think in stories; stories are powerful tools of persuasion, and sometimes we even let ourselves be manipulated by them. What’s more…sometimes we reshape the way we think about our life, recasting our biography, as it were, in the mould provided by a story.

This has been the case for thousands of years, probably for as long as there have been human beings on planet earth. But it’s got much, much more intense with the arrival of film and television. These days we all grow up with stories presented to us on screens, i.e. in a visual form. And these visual stories are so powerful that they tend to influence us even more than written stories did; they leave the small or big screen and spill over into our real lives, so that reality becomes recast in the mould provided by fiction. If I were to guess, I’d say it’s still a poorly understood phenomenon. What does it do to our brains when we watch visual stories and let them impact our real lives?

If you now think, “Oh, but that just happens to dumb people. Not to me! It’s this low-IQ approach to movies, you know, where people think that an actor who played a villain on screen is a bad person in real life too, where people cannot distinguish between fiction and reality anymore and assume that just because two actors kissed on screen, they must be lovers in real life,” if you think that, dear reader, I can guarantee you that you’re wrong. It’s not just dumb people who fall into the ‘reality-as-fiction’ trap.

This happens to all of us. You and me included.

Definitely.

Any time you watch a TV show and have a strong emotional reaction to it, one that leads to you demanding that, say, the laws in your country pertaining to the issue depicted on that show be changed, any time that happens to you, you have fallen into this trap, as well. (And that happens to me, too, from time to time. It can happen to anyone.)

You’ve watched a fictional story, but you’re demanding real-life consequences because you’re convinced that ‘it’s just like that in real life; it’s just as bad; someone has to do something’.

Whenever that happens to me, I always feel it’s a good idea to take a deep breath, take a step back and then maybe check who funded the production company that made the show in question. It’s perfectly possible that my government did finance this TV show in some way, shape or form and that I was supposed to have this exact reaction. It’s perfectly possible that clever politicians had the (otherwise potentially unpopular) amendments to those laws prepared already, and this show was just one tool in a multi-pronged PR campaign to force through a policy change. (And no, this doesn’t just happen in authoritarian regimes. This is literally how a lot of government policies are sold to the public in democracies – especially there! Because where you have voters and not just subjects, persuasion is most needed. That’s one of those facts students usually find most difficult to believe, but meticulously combing through, “Who financed your favourite TV show or movie,” is usually pretty eye-opening on that front.)

Even if there is nothing nefarious of this kind going on, I always find a healthy dose of scepticism is in order whenever I, tvmicroscope, have a strong emotional reaction to a recent piece of media everyone is talking about. At the very least, it makes sense to read up on what the opponents on the issue depicted in it have to say. And when I say ‘read up on the opponents’ point of view’, I don’t mean read up on what your side says the opponents allegedly think. Read your opponents in their own words; that’s very important. Your own side will just provide you with caricatures of evil people believing and doing evil things. An intellectually honest approach means confronting yourself with what the other side thinks in an honest and sincere way.

Which is exactly what my friend meant: We watch a work of fiction (a film or show, for example); we have a strong emotional response to it, i.e. we agree with its basic premise and main message. (It’s possible that we’re embracing it so eagerly because we already had a fuzzy notion along those lines floating about in our subconscious before watching said show or movie, and it just generally supports our basic biases and worldview.) Then we jump from that work of fiction to reality and suddenly demand real-life consequences, a real-life response to something fictional. In our future thinking on the issue presented on that show, we then cast ourselves as the hero of the story. Anyone who opposes us is an evil villain. A potentially very complex issue is boiled down to a good-versus-evil story, if you’re not for this, you’re the villain just like the villain in that movie or TV show. (You wouldn’t believe how often students think along those lines and how often their reason for a strong, passionately held belief on some issue…is a TV show these days!)

This is fiction spilling over into reality. And boy, does this happen to a lot of people! (I could tell you endless examples of students being absolutely, utterly convinced that, in my country, we have a law x,y,z on the books when the law in question…doesn’t even exist and never existed here in the first place. Where do they get this from? TV! The law in question exists in whatever country the TV show they watched was set in, usually the US. But this doesn’t stop students from assuming that the same law must be in force in each and every single European country – even when it’s blatantly untrue. Often they’re about five minutes away from taking to the streets, protesting and demanding changes to a law…that doesn’t exist here, fighting an issue that is very US-specific and has no equivalent in the country they live in. That is the power of television!)

If you’re struggling to follow what I, and my literature teacher friend, are trying to say here, let me give you a hypothetical example:

Imagine you’ve just watched a very well-made show about the issue of assisted suicide, a very contentious and complex issue, obviously.

This (hypothetical) show presented you with a very sympathetic main character who was dying of some horrible disease. Over the course of many, many episodes, you followed this beloved character as they fought their own government and their justice system to get access to a provider of assisted suicide services. The evil bureaucracy, politicians, judges, etc. made that impossible, and eventually the character died in agonizing pain, suffering a great deal.

So, you’ve watched this entire show, and you’re having a strong emotional reaction to it now. (That’s only natural, after all.) Perhaps this story only amplified feelings you already had on the issue, anyway. Perhaps you had a similar experience with a relative. Or perhaps you’re just a strong believer in the rights of individuals to make their own choices where their bodies and their lives are concerned. In any case, you become more involved with the issue in real life. You never look up who funded the production of this show, of course, because you never do. (“It’s just Netflix,” is one of the things I often hear from my students. But that’s not how that works. At all.) You become a strong advocate for assisted suicide, and whenever you’re asked, you claim that, yes, you have read all the opponents’ counterarguments, and clearly these people are all just conservative Christians who hate people and want them to suffer for their ‘sky daddy’ that you don’t believe in, anyway. You’re very vocal about your disdain for those people who are holding everyone back and preventing progress from happening (as you see it), and somehow you never notice that you’ve never read your opponents in their own words. You’ve just read what your side writes your opponents’ arguments allegedly are.

In other words, you have turned your life into a movie: You’re the good guy. The others are the evil villains. You’re for progress. And they are the reactionaries who just hate. (You like to use the word ‘hate’ a lot because that makes you sound like the virtuous main character in your own movie. The other side must be just filled with hate, and that’s the reason why they believe what they believe. It’s also the reason why they will fail, you think. Because movies have taught you that hate never wins, and progress marches on inexorably.)

Until one day you accidentally meet somebody who actually holds that other view, and boy, is that a surprise. For one, they’re not a Christian or religious at all. They’re not particularly conservative either. They are however from a country were assisted suicide is legal, and they tell you how euthanasia cases have skyrocketed over the last couple of years. They tell you that a large percentage of the people who were assisted in dying in this way had had a mental health issue, often one that could have been successfully addressed. They tell you that many of these people were actually simply depressed, and an appalling number of them were on the autism spectrum. All of that…despite the fact that the government had always assured any critic that this would never happen, that mental health care would always be prioritized over euthanasia, that a whole panel of psychologists, doctors and ethicists would decide each and every single case on an individual basis.

You are horrified. You realize that what you had done over the years was: You had lived in your own movie where you were the good main character and the other side were evil villains. You had thought they were all religious fundamentalists out to prevent people from making their own choices and decisions about their own bodies, but it turned out your opponents were actually largely people from disability advocacy groups and mental health care and neurodiversity interest groups. The whole issue was actually far more complex than the TV show you had liked so much had led you to believe.

It’s possible that you will stick to your guns at this point (which is absolutely your right!), but hopefully you will do so in a more informed way henceforth. Hopefully, you will have learned that most issues are far, far, far more complex than their often extreme and hyperbolic dramatizations on screen make us believe.

Examples like the one above happen a lot if you work in a job where you teach young people: They watch a TV show and become strong advocates for or against something. They start to think of their lives in terms of a movie, casting themselves as the virtuous main character and their opponents on the issue as the villains in the story. At no point, does it enter their brain that they jumped from a fictional story to real life and let that fictional story spill over into reality. At no point, do they see that they boiled down a very complex issue to a simple television narrative.

Reality is not fiction.

Strong emotions about a movie or TV show should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism. If an argument holds up (even after some thorough research, a deep dive into the statistics on the issue and especially after taking into consideration what the other side thinks in their own words), then…and only then…is an opinion well-informed. Everything else probably just means you’ve been manipulated. And if you think this doesn’t happen to you, I can assure you it does! It happens to me. It happens to you. It happens to all of us.

We let fiction spill over into reality. And we recast reality in the mould of fiction all the time. Fiction is incredibly powerful; it influences us in ways we cannot even begin to understand.

(And on the off chance that you’re one of my students (holding my fingers crossed here that that never happens): If what you’ve taken away from the last couple of paragraphs is that I am either for or against assisted suicide, then you didn’t understand what I was trying to say there; please re-read the paragraphs in question.)

I believe we have a few midwives in the crowd here, so let me finish this mini-rant by telling you something you probably know already, but which was news to me: I was recently told that an increasing number of young mothers-to-be do not understand that the pain and contractions they are going through…mean that they are going into labour. Why? Because movies have told them again and again that a birth has to start with the ‘Ooops-my-water-broke’ moment, and when that moment fails to materialize in real life, they simply cannot frame their experience as ‘going into labour’. Movies taught them to think of reality in one way and one way only. And now they’re incapable of understanding that the reality of birth is actually more complex. This is an example of fiction spilling over into reality and having the potential to cause great harm to real people in real life.

Reality is not fiction.

That’s what my friend meant.

Another thing I come across fairly often in real life is the ‘motif fallacy’, as I like to call it:

While watching some show or movie, eagle-eyed viewers will often realize that some visual element or verbal expression keeps coming up again and again…

…but then, for reasons that are honestly beyond me, these same people won’t do anything with that knowledge and just assume that this thing is something the filmmaker in question just loves to show or mention repeatedly for no metaphorical reason whatsoever.

Professional movie reviewers who work for newspapers and all sorts of magazines often fall into this category; they’re actually the main culprits here, to be honest, and that’s what makes reading their reviews so incredibly annoying: They will tell you about some recurring motif they’ve spotted in whatever movie or show they are reviewing (if you’re lucky, they will even call it a ‘motif’ and won’t confuse you with any wrong lingo on that front), but then…they will just gloss over its meaning by saying that ‘this motif makes the whole show visually stunning’ or ‘this motif helps us empathize with the main protagonist’ or ‘this motif really brings home the emotions the characters feel in this situation’. All of which is just another way of saying, “I don’t know what it means. But hey, look, I’m good at counting and I’ve counted this thing approximately 17 and a half times throughout this whole movie. Isn’t that great?!”

People like that will notice that the show ‘Young Royals’ tends to throw the number 2 around a lot (after all, it keeps coming up again and again and again), but they won’t even try to work out what that might mean. It’s just a quirk of the screenplay, in their opinion. (And if you’ve been following this here blog for a while, then you do, of course, know what it means and how it’s connected to Simon’s backstory that we can only find in the subtext of this show.)

Or they will see the many, many, many close-ups of hands (and even just verbal references to hands) in the movie ‘Titanic’ and will assume that, “Oh, it’s just that Jack and Rose love each other very much, so they keep holding hands.” Or: “Oh, well, when we remember things, we like to touch them because memory is such a tactile thing. And that’s why there are so many hands. People are remembering stuff.”

A motif needs to make sense. And the moment you tell them that Mr. Bodine (one of the treasure hunters in the frame narrative of ‘Titanic’ who is searching for the blue heart-shaped diamond in the wreck) says, “Give me my hands, man,” at the beginning of the movie, referring to the giant robot hands he is using once the ROV has been released from the submarine in order to search the underwater wreck…once you point to that quote from the screenplay, for example, the whole theory about Jack and Rose holding hands because they love each other or the theory about memory being tactile – all of those fuzzy ideas and vague theories just fall apart.

When something keeps coming up again and again in a text, any text (visual or verbal), we call it a ‘motif’. Motifs are a very common literary device, and their main defining characteristic is the fact that they are recurring. And here comes the kicker: They usually mean something. Something deeper.

And as a viewer, you can either work out that meaning or you can’t (which, full disclosure, happens often enough to me, as well). When you can’t, then perhaps…you simply shouldn’t bring up the motif in question in the review you’re writing for whatever newspaper you’re working for. Because telling your readers all about the motif without giving them its meaning is kinda cruel, right?

In any case…The idea I proposed (hands in the movie ‘Titanic’ are about agency, about taking action, about taking fate into your own hands, about overcoming the potentially deadly inaction, inertia and passivity of your old life in order to start a new one), this hypothesis I proposed makes much more sense, I think.

In a later scene, Mr. Bodine gets all retroactively enraged about Captain Smith’s actions aboard the Titanic 84 years prior to the events presented in the frame narrative. He exclaims, “Incredible! There’s Smith, and he’s standing there, and he’s got the iceberg warning in his fucking hand – excuse me – his hand, and he’s ordering more speed.”

Look, James Cameron is even drawing attention to the word ‘hand’ in his screenplay by using an expletive here, then making Mr. Bodine explicitly apologize for its use and say the word ‘hand’ again. You couldn’t make it any more obvious that the word ‘hand’ in this particular dialogue is important.

And what are we told?

That Captain Smith doesn’t act on the iceberg warnings he keeps receiving. He remains stuck in his old mindset. He does what Bruce Ismay expects of him. He just listens to what the owner of the ship tells him: He orders full speed.

Captain Smith has the inertia of 26 years of experience on the high seas working against him. He is used to handling things in a certain (old-fashioned) way. He isn’t used to anything unusual or new or out of the ordinary. So, he doesn’t rebel against Bruce Ismay in this movie, and he doesn’t tell him to go to hell. He doesn’t do anything with these iceberg warnings. Passivity. Inertia. Inaction. And ultimately, moral cowardice.

The fact that he’s holding the iceberg warning in his hand and doesn’t do anything with it leads to his demise.

The fact that Rose, on the other hand, grabs life (as personified by her catalyst character Jack) by the hand means she can and will be saved at the end of the story.

Motifs don’t just recur because the filmmaker in question has a penchant for hands (or whatever it may be). There is usually an underlying metaphorical meaning. You just have to find it – and ideally: to connect it to the rest of the metaphorical subtext of the story you’re examining. Just as we did with the big central metaphor above:

Captain Smith not doing anything with the iceberg warning he’s holding in his hand leads to the sinking of the ship. But the ship, as we have discussed above, is also a metaphor for Edwardian society. So, this inaction in spite of clear and explicit warnings also tells us something about Edwardian society. Namely, that there were alarming signals that this type of society wasn’t sustainable for much longer, that it would all end in a big conflagration (cf. World War I, followed by World War II, etc.). There were warnings. But the men in charge just didn’t listen (like Captain Smith). The men at the helm of this metaphorical ‘ship’ didn’t see the ‘iceberg’ despite the clear warnings that they got. It was their inertia, their passivity, their complacency and smugness that led to their own demise and the foundering of their ‘ship’ (read: society).

(Kinda makes you wonder low-key what disaster movie they will make about us 100 years from now. What metaphor will they use for our civilization foundering? Which might very well be what we are sensing the very beginnings of at the moment, but hey I’m a pessimist, what do I know. In any case, it would be so, so interesting to know how that will be framed in the future? Will they use a giant ship going down, too? Something else? Who knows.)

Anyway…

At this point, our imaginary Viewer will go slack-jawed again: “You’re just connecting this hand motif to the metaphor of the ship, too? O-okay…Is this allowed? Isn’t all of this a bit far-fetched?”

Me: “No, it’s not. That’s how screenwriting works: In for a penny, in for a pound. If as a screenwriter, you introduce a metaphor into a text, it is meaningful wherever in the text it shows up. If not…try to make it meaningful even if you have to twist history or medical accuracy for that a little bit. And once you introduce some motif or other…make sure it links back to your central metaphor, as well.”

It’s really not that complicated…is it?

You know what’s really complicated?

It’s not just about the metaphors:

The characters all have functions, too!

They aren’t just random people with random identities and character traits the screenwriter came up with by throwing the dice in order to fill his or her screenplay. They’re personifications of the main protagonist’s secret thoughts, their fears and doubts, for example. They’re personifications of the main protagonist’s future or past or some other abstract concept. Each and every human being who shows up on screen, even the background extras, usually has a subtextual function like that (and you can even include the four-legged characters here). And those character functions all link back to the story’s metaphorical subtext described above.

But hey, the character thing is actually so complex and sounds so ‘out there’ that a lot of viewers never get it, never even spot it and certainly cannot decipher the characters’ meaning unless they were taught how to do that.

Characters are hard. And that’s okay.

But since I’ve just mentioned how strongly interconnected everything in a screenplay’s metaphorical subtext usually is, let me mention one last thought: Once you spot (and decipher) a metaphor, you have be on the lookout for more metaphors. Because chances are…that wasn’t the only one. They tend to show up in clusters. And usually, they have to be read together in order to give you the subtextual story hidden underneath the text.

How is it possible, for example, that some people watch the crime drama ‘The Sopranos’ and instantly spot the ‘fire’ metaphor in it (fire is a metaphor for love and passion on this show)…and yet they don’t ever connect this insight to anything else in the text?! So they don’t understand why it is that Tony Soprano tells his mistress Valentina he doesn’t want to go on a beach holiday with her because he’s scared he might get a sunburn!

Tony Soprano is afraid of falling in love with his mistress, is what this means. It’s easy. Once you’ve worked out the ‘fire’ metaphor, you can just connect it to the rest of the text: Fire and burning are metaphors for falling in love.

Tony Soprano enjoys his mistress’s cooking (aaaand there’s the other metaphor in this scene for you: the food on the show ‘The Sopranos’ represents sex, surprise, surprise!), but he doesn’t want to go on holiday with her because he is scared of burning in the sun (read: scared of falling in love). This is a guy with some serious commitment issues, just saying.

And then while they are discussing this very issue, the mistress, who is currently cooking him breakfast, is so angry about Tony’s whole ‘I’m-scared-of-a-sunburn’ routine and distracted by their fight that she doesn’t pay attention to what she is doing with the frying pan in her hand and accidentally burns half her face off.

I cannot tell you how often I had to tell people that, “Yes, you’ve worked out the ‘fire’ metaphor, bravo!…Now please connect this insight to this here scene! And try to connect it to the other metaphor in the scene too, while you’re at it.”

The mistress severely burns herself while cooking Tony’s breakfast. Translation: She thought their relationship was just about the sex (metaphorically: she was just cooking for him) and yet, while she never intended to do so, she fell in love with him (burnt herself severely while cooking). It was supposed to be just a between-the-sheets deal, but now she’s got herself some feelings for the big, bad mafia boss, and ooooh, that love hurts so, so much. Man, it burns.

People see the metaphor. And then they don’t do anything with it. Although why they wouldn’t is honestly beyond me.

What’s more…once his mistress is lying in a hospital bed all burnt, Tony suddenly doesn’t like to look at her anymore. He finds her ugly now. He doesn’t want her anymore. (Here’s the scene.)

And yes. Yes! Of course, you have to connect that to the metaphor you have already worked out, as well. And what a great and dark subtext you get right there! Wow! Just wow!

If ‘burning’ means ‘falling in love’, then this whole moment of Tony not liking his mistress anymore because she has second-degree burns now means…

…he doesn’t like her as a mistress anymore because she has fallen in love with him!

This man is scared of commitment. He is scared of getting too close to anybody. And the moment his mistress metaphorically ‘burns’ for him, he is out the door; he breaks up with her. What a dark psychological study this is! (And this on a show whose basic premise is all about the big mob boss going to a shrink because he’s not as tough as you might think at first glance!)

Just listen to how Tony tells his mistress, “You’ll heal up,” and “You’ll meet somebody else,” in that scene. He says one line immediately after the other.

That’s because metaphorically, burning and falling in love…is the same thing on this show. And thus healing and getting over somebody…is also the same thing.

The number of times people told me that, surely, fire must be a metaphor for passion and love on the ‘The Sopranos’ and were then absolutely gobsmacked when I told them the whole subtext of Tony’s burnt mistress Valentina…Tssss.

How can you see something and then just somehow…magically unsee it the moment it actually matters in the text?

I don’t know where I’m going with this, and I guess this post got away from me a little bit. But for Heaven’s sake, don’t be like the many, many, many students, acquaintances, friends, relatives, etc. whom I made losing their minds over something that they had technically already worked out themselves but then hadn’t managed to fully think through.

Thinking something through is really important in film analysis!

When you spot a metaphor and even work out its meaning, don’t just assume that that’s some vague, general statement the screenwriter made. Take the spoils of your labour, take that insight that you have gained (after all, you have done it yourself; you’ve spotted and worked it out all on your own!)...and apply it, for Heaven’s sake!

Don’t just leave it rotting in that fruit basket of good ideas forever.

Insights gained need to be applied.

Metaphors don’t just describe some vague, fuzzy concept in a movie. They are not that gold nugget you pick up from your steel pan only to throw it back into the river again. They’re waiting to be picked up and held up against each and every single line of the screenplay. Because what they actually are is just as beautiful as a gold nugget: They’re an exquisite, beautifully crafted piece of stained glass turning the sunlight that’s filtering through it into a thousand dazzling, colourful flares and sparks dancing across the text.

~fin~

P.S. It’s possible that at this point you go, “Tvmicroscope, don’t you have better things to do than rant at us here?”

Ah, yes. But what would count as a better thing to do, my dear?

Telling you a random true story about reality, art and form…and (possibly) fiction, perhaps? One you might not have heard before? Alright, here we go:

In 1903 the surrealist composer Erik Satie was criticized rather harshly by his more successful Impressionist colleague and friend Claude Debussy:

Debussy reproached Satie, telling him that he should pay more attention to form in his compositions.

Satie responded by composing something he called ‘Trois Morceaux en forme de poire’ (Three Pieces in the shape of a pear). Such was Satie’s sense of humour. And of course, the pear-shaped composition has by now become one of the more famous piano four-hands suites of the piano literature. (Take that, Debussy!) What is form, what is art…And who will be the judge of that, in the end?

And since Satie had aligned himself with the Dada movement early on and was just generally an eccentric chap with a good sense of humour, you can probably guess that there’s more to this composition than meets the eye: For one, this little piano suite with its official title ‘Three Pieces’ consists not of three…but of seven pieces. And it goes without saying that nothing in the music itself suggests any kind of connection with the ‘pear’ in its title.

What’s more, nobody knows if the story about Debussy reproaching Satie and Satie responding in this way is even true. It might very well be a legend. But it’s a legend that has become larger than life. After all, life itself is often so much stranger than fiction. And in Dadaism…what is life? What is fiction? What is reality?

All I know is that it is the story I was told by the first love in my life (who loved Satie deeply and fiercely) right before we put the sheet music of the ‘Trois Morceaux’ on the piano music stand and went about our business. (If you play the piano and ever want to give it a try, find yourself a reasonably capable partner and have at it; it’s not that difficult to play.)

Here’s a rendition by the inimitable Alexandre Tharaud & Éric le Sage that is just perfect. Enjoy and remember…

Fiction is not reality. Reality is not fiction. But all life is…Dada.

(Source: Wikimedia Commons; image is in the public domain.)

Ramón Casas: ‘El Bohemio, Poet of Montmartre’ – portrait of Erik Satie (1891).