Found In Translation.
Make less sense.
There are ghosts. All fields of human endeavour are littered with old wisdoms whose continuing survival is unrelated to their value as truth. Filmmaking has plenty I detest. “Kill your darlings”, “Show don’t tell”, “Write what you know” or possibly the one that irritates me the most, “If you’ve got a message, send it by Western Union”. Ghosts I tell you. In different ways they all open up Darwin’s true usage of “fittest”. It’s not that these ideas lack utility, it’s just that they work best not as advice for writers but as advice to give to writers. They survive because, much like “survival of the fittest”, they feel simple and you look good saying them.
Ghosts threaten. Ghosts warn. Ghosts despair. Versions of “If you’ve got a message, send it by Western Union” are attributed to Sam Goldwyn, Moss Hart, one of the other Warner brothers, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Ernest Hemingway. The face value meaning of the idea is that a cinema is a popular entertainment, so when a writer gets earnest about the message of their story you close them down with the casual rebuke that messages are for postmen. Yet even ghosts deliver messages.
This sense of cinema frustrates me because all stories have meaning. The meaning can be conformist and patriarchal like “Pretty Woman” or disquieting and provocative like “Dirty Dancing” but all stories teach how happiness is found and lost, earned or bankrupted. That alone is a social commandment that inevitably creates or attacks a view of reality. Besides, we’re a species who can find significance in stars and the motion of birds. If the wind in the window pane can become the voice of an ancestor trapped in the walls then what chance has anything of not sending us a message?
So for me the Western Union dictum has always seemed to seek to erase an important part of the writer’s job, being alert to the signals the story gives off, whether deliberate or accidental. However I’ve slowly realised that I am afflicted with a burning need for clarity that, as I hope you can appreciate, I am gradually attempting to confound. Because though we find messages everywhere, we pay least attention to those we are handed. Send flowers. Don’t tell them you love them. Send flowers.
I recently caught a Scottish movie called Run. Shot in 2019 its release was probably heavily impacted by the pandemic which is a shame because it’s the sort of little gem that sticks in the mind. Set in Fraserburgh, it’s a slice of life captured through some brilliant performances, some great photography and a sound mix which, on my laptop at least, swamped the Aberdeenshire dialect to the point where for great stretches of the film I was constantly bent toward the screen sure I’d missed something important. “D’ya ken hen? I’m nae gane haime.”
It’s not that I didn’t understand what the characters said, just that the understanding wasn’t instant. I had to concentrate, picking out voices from the sounds of sea and petrol engines and untangling what for me are unfamiliar vowel sounds. Perhaps aware of this, director Scott Graham often draws the eye to body language, to hands restless and fidgety, to legs that want to move and bodies that resist this call. The whole effect disconnects what they say from what they are doing.
My experience of watching it reminded me of my great Luc Besson revelation. I adored “La Femme Nikita” which seemed so moody, so French, so philosophical about the nature of love and duty. I was then baffled by “The Fifth Element” a film consistently filled with iconic images which are arranged to so little purpose. Where I wanted it to be profound it was just profoundly silly. Returning to “Nikita” I had to painfully admit it too was far sillier than I remembered. I’m always here for Anne Parillaud shooting up hotel rooms in her bra and pants but slowly it dawned on me that the only reason this wonderful nonsense ever seemed to have any intellectual heft was because it also had subtitles.
What a vastly more powerful film “The Fifth Element” would have been in French, or any language I can’t understand. I don’t think it’s a blanket rule that subtitled films are all dumber than we imagine but I do think it’s easy to underestimate the power of subtitling to confer subtlety. The distance that subtitles bring, the way your comprehension becomes disjointed from the action, creates a space for you to fill. Watching any film in English I’m not missing anything. Watching with the meaning overlaid in text I am always gently aware that I am missing some mother tongue nuance. I understand less and so I can let it mean more. The history of Anglo-French cinema is of clichés rescued and restored to potent mystery. What Tarantino copies from Godard is just what Godard rescued from Jack Warner, each time made magical by a lack of complete understanding.
I write this not as a criticism of Besson but a confession of my own accursed need for clarity which ruins so much of what I watch. OK, if he did imagine Milla Jovovich in her pants was a profound statement about the fabric of reality, then sure, he’s wrong - but why do I let that failure deafen me to all the cacophonous joyous incoherent something the film opens up for us to explore? As a celebration of the alien, the bold and the strange, it couldn’t possibly be more timely.
Besides, whatever artists may imagine, what the audience bring to the work is always more important. The message received always is more powerful than the message sent. Looking back, who cares if Besson wasn’t saying what I thought he was, that doesn’t mean the message I got wasn’t there.
There are no ghosts but that doesn’t mean people haven’t seen them, haven’t drawn inspiration from creaking floorboards. Were a ghost to send a telegram it would only say that you too are mortal, that you too will one day barely rattle the glass in the frame. The message of a ghost story is far less compelling than the sense that a message is incoherently waiting for us in the woodwork.
My latest screenwriting course ended last week but returns again in June. Meanwhile, if you know anyone who might enjoy improving their storytelling, or even start it, I’m running a half day taster for the course on April 29th. Full details and booking here.