Who's Behind The Curtain?

"As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."
Ernest Hemingway

I'm not gonna call a guy who blew his head off with a shotgun my hero, but Hemingway did have a strong influence on several of my perspectives.

I think it's OK to have heroes and folks you admire ... so long as you can accept that they are real people, warts and all, without changing your mind with every new tide.

I'm not sure what it says about someone who can do an abrupt about-face and start vilifying yesterday's hero, except that such a person was probably just a toadie and a sycophant in the first place.

Magic Doesn't Work If You Already Know The Trick

Remember The Wizard of Oz, near the end when Dorothy goes behind the curtain and discovers there is no Wizard, after all?

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water. "
Ernest Hemingway

That scene sums up how art works, and why most major movies fall so flat on their faces.

If a producer (or nowdays, a committee of studio executives with no background in either Drama or Film) sits around in a screening room murdering the director's and screenwriter's vision with "notes" dictating that certain extra stuff has to be fitted in somehow (like gratuitous nudity and sexual content) to make sure the film gets "good box office" or because they happen to like a certain scene, then all they've done is rip down the curtain to let the audience see there is no wizard after all.

Motion pictures are the most powerful and immediate communication medium known: sitting in a dark room watching a story unfold on a larger-than-life screen is a shared emotional experience going all the way back to the nights when our ancestors sat huddled together in fire-lit caves (with hungry lions, hyenas and saber-toothed tigers lurking in the foyer) and learned about life and themselves through the stories they heard and shared.

Those earliest dramas used a technique too often dismissed by studio executives: the tales the first storytellers told, probably the re-telling of heroic hunts and epic battles, used emotion to grip the audience, and created a common and unifying experience by placing that audience within the action ... which also had the benefit of teaching and communicating a thing or two about How to Survive in an environment filled with constant threats and The Unknown.

The caveman story-teller describing how his neighbor Nak was ripped apart by a man-eating tiger couldn't risk losing his audience's attention by distracting them with a favorite cliche about how he'd once seen a beautiful butterfly gentlly floating atop a tiger's back, which suddenly caused him to realize that all creatures should live together in peace.

For crying out loud, all the audience wanted to know was what happened to Nak next and how much did it hurt.

Today it's called The Suspension of Disbelief. And for the audience to forget that they're watching a film, we need tension.

If the audience is holding on tight to the edge of their seats, focusing on what happens next that means their brains are involved, active and participating in the story ... that doesn't leave them much opportunity to get distracted and start fidgeting.

Getting back to Hemingway's iceberg: tension doesn't come from what we see; tension comes from what we don't see and must imagine ... because it hasn't being shown. (That might be why some photographers and DPs use so many shadows in their images. Shadows force your brain to pay attention to the puzzle, and imagine what else must be there inside.)

The cavemen and cavewomen who were too busy or preoccupied with other things to imagine what else is there? had their genes withdrawn from the DNA pool pretty quickly by the hungry predators that knew the most satisfying meals seldom took the trouble (or had the smarts) to be on-edge about shadows.

(And folks ... this isn't about what's "pretty" or "looks good" to your eyes, because movies aren't postcards. It's a science about how our brains and eyes work together that we're taking about.)

The first time Org the Story-Telling Caveman interrupted his frightening tale of How Wak Was Eaten By A Crocodile with an aside about how Wak's enemy Mog had more wives than Wak did (which Org only included because Mog carries a club in each hand and besides, Mog really likes that part), Org broke the Fourth Wall and reminded the audience that that they were just listening to a story, rather than participiating in it.

Or even worse, the first time Org introduced deus ex machina by having a talking rock suddenly whisper a secret escape route to save Wak's life, so there'd be a happy ending, Org the Storyteller was probably beaten half-silly with his own club and tossed outside the cave the play with the pterodactyls.

Even cavemen knew better than to accept trick endings and implausible situations.

They would've seen it was Org pulling levers behind the curtain ... and that there was no Wizard in Oz after all.

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More Hemingway quotes here.