Movies on the Brain

Natalie Portman, Black SwanGreg Miller’s recent Wired article about how movies trick your brain into empathizing with characters begins by describing the scene from 2010’s psychological thriller Black Swan. In this intense scene, Natalie Portman, playing a ballerina vying for the role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, begins to believe black feathers are sprouting from her skin. “When people watch this scene,” Miller says, “their brain activity bears some resemblance to a pattern that’s been observed in people with schizophrenia,” according to neuroscientist Talma Hendler.

At a recent Hollywood event, Black Swan’s director, Darren Aronofsky, said he’d “be thrilled” if he gave audiences “a temporary taste of psychosis.” It may work that way through the activity in two brain regions shown by functional MRIs to be connected with empathy: one, she calls “mental empathy,” the classic, putting yourself in another person’s shoes feeling; the second, “embodied empathy,” is more visceral, the kind of weak-in-the-knees feeling I get when I see someone else’s cut or injury.

Having studied people’s reactions to emotional movie scenes, Hendler believes both types of empathy are important in shaping what they experience. Schizophrenics, however, tend to rely more on mental empathy. “It’s as if they’re having to think through the emotional impact of situations that other people grasp more intuitively and automatically,” she suggested. And in that scene from Black Swan, Aronofsky believes viewers’ minds mimic that, by being engaged in trying to figure out whether the feathers are real or Portman’s hallucination.

Aronofsky, known for his surreal and sometimes disturbing work, uses a filmmaker’s entire toolbox to shape the audience’s emotional reactions. He cited his film Requiem for a Dream, in which addictions cause the main characters’ lives to spin out of control (Ellen Burstyn received an Academy Award nomination). He began that movie with wide shots, graduating to tighter and tighter ones, “to convey an increasingly subjective sense of what the characters were experiencing. There’s always a theory of where the camera is and why it’s there.”

Life is a Riddle and a Mystery

By Linda C. Wisniewski, Guest Blogger

pen and ink, writing, memoir

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

At my Unitarian church, we sing a hymn with the repeating refrain, “Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery.” I read lots of mystery novels, and I write and teach memoir. For me, the two genres are not that far apart.

Writing a memoir is a lot like unraveling a mystery. Where you think you are going is often very different from where you find yourself at the end. Good memoir writing, and I mean good for the writer as well as the reader, always involves the process of self-discovery.

Just as all stories begin with the main character’s motivation or desire, the same is true in memoir. The writer wants to discover something about his life, or the characters in his life story. Quite often the process of writing changes the motivation of the memoirist.

In my memoir, Off Kilter, I wrote that “I wanted to understand why my mother couldn’t protect me from my father’s verbal abuse. I wanted to know why she cut me down instead of building me up….She let herself be silenced. She silenced herself. More than anything, I want to understand.”

While writing is not therapy, it can be therapeutic. It wasn’t so much that writing helped me understand my mother, but rather that it helped me accept who she was. I discovered the answer to the mystery of my life: I held in my hands the ability to create my own happiness, as a grown woman, apart from her. After Off Kilter was published, friends suggested more ways I could try to understand my mother. Call relatives, research history, read self-help books. But I was no longer interested. My motivation had changed.

In his memoir, Elsewhere, Richard Russo comes to suspect his mother suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder and feels tremendous guilt, seeing himself as her “principal enabler. Because…like other addicts, obsessives can’t do it on their own. As they gradually lose the control they so desperately seek, they have little choice but to ensnare loved ones.” He holds this discovery for the very end, creating a powerful resolution for himself and the reader.

Years ago, I opened my lunchtime talk at a senior citizens center with the rhetorical question, “Why should you write your memoir?”

A tiny woman in the front row piped up so all could hear, “Yeah, why should I?” She made me laugh, but I totally get where she was coming from. I’ll bet her children and grandchildren were always telling her to write down the stories of her life. But she didn’t want to, and I was hard-pressed to convince her otherwise. I listed the mental and physical health benefits of writing about emotionally significant events, but she did not sign up for my class. And she had a very good point. She could see no reason to revisit the past.

Critics complain there are too many “confessional” memoirs, perhaps recalling the confession or romance magazines aimed at working-class women. In the New York Times Book Review Neil Genzlinger wrote a piece called “The Trouble with Memoirs,” in which he asked for a “moment of silence for the lost art of shutting up.” It caused quite a stir, but the conclusion can be drawn that he was complaining about badly written memoirs, of which there are many.

Stephen Elliott wrote in The Rumpus that “…celebrity memoirs are rarely interesting, despite how interesting their lives appear from the outside. The problem is not that they don’t live interesting lives, it’s that they’re not writers.”

Memoir writing is a risky proposition. “I see you in a whole different way now,” said my book club friend after reading Off Kilter. When I started to write seriously, I joined an online group called Risky Writers. We wrote and critiqued short pieces which involved emotional risk when shared. What would others think if they knew we had done these things? We learned to critique the writing, not the life style of the writer.

Despite the temptation to judge the lives of memoir writers, we don’t think of judging fictional characters. “She shouldn’t have done that!” Well, yes, she should have. That’s how she got into trouble, and why we keep turning the page, especially in a well-plotted mystery. Will she get what she wants in the end? Or does she discover something better?

Genzlinger ended his Times Book Review piece like this. “Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it.” I would add, don’t publish it yet. And don’t give up looking for the mystery.

Linda Wisniewski

Linda Wisniewski (photo: courtesy of the author)

Linda C. Wisniewski lives in Doylestown, Pa., where she teaches memoir workshops and writes for a local newspaper. Her credits include newspapers,  Hippocampus, other literary magazines, and several anthologies. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won first prizes in the Pearl Buck International Short Story Contest as well as the Wild River Review essay contest. Linda’s memoir, Off Kilter: a Woman’s Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother, and Her Polish Heritage, was published in 2008 by Pearlsong Press. Visit her at www.lindawis.com.

Tearful Fiction

snowy owl, Hedwig

(photo: wikimedia.org)

What happens when a book character you’ve come to love dies—or a relationship you’ve treasured comes to naught? Grief, that’s what. The five stages of fictional grief—rereading (“did I get that right?”), dismay, rationalization and hope, anger (throw the book across the room), and never getting over it—are explored in an amusing Bookriot post by Susie Rodarme. Anger is appropriate when characters are killed off randomly, to keep them from cluttering up the plot any longer.

We saw a manifestation of these stages on social media when Downton Abbey’s Matthew Crawley came to his untimely end. “I can’t believe it!” “Nooooooo.” “I’m not watching any more!” “Maybe he’s not reaaally dead?” For readers of paranormal fiction, there’s always a chance . . .

Tess of the D’Urbervilles was a real weepy for me. I read it several times and, once I knew the ending, began getting weepy from page one (delicious!). Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (review here) is the most recent book that prompted those “why did she have to die?” feelings, and true regret that left me down for days.

The comments on Rodarme’s post are interesting. Must be a youngish crowd, since most of their literary tear-blotting experiences are associated with Harry Potter, and repeatedly cited is the death of Hedwig, a character introduced this way: “Harry now carried a large cage that held a beautiful snowy owl, fast asleep with her head under her wing.” I’m guessing many of those who say they grieved long and hard over Hedwig, subconsciously at least, recognize her death symbolized Harry’s loss of innocence, and that’s what they regret, as well.

Creativity is UP!

Up, Navy Pilot

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) is a classic study of the way metaphor shapes our understanding of the world. Published in 1980, it dismisses the idea that metaphors are strictly a matter of language, the frosting on the cake of meaning, as argued by various competing philosophical and linguistic traditions. In what I usually read, the search for truth is conducted not by academics, but by a fictional detective, so some of this was heavy going. Where the authors dig into the language, their examples are fascinating.

Lakoff and Johnson are not generally talking about literary metaphors, but rather about the ones so thoroughly absorbed into the language that we no longer notice them as metaphors. One fundamental set of such metaphors reflects “orientation”: up-down, in-out, back-front, and so on. Although some metaphors in this set appear to be more or less universal across languages, others are more culturally determined. In Western culture, many common phrases reflect the metaphor “happy is up” and its opposite, “sad is down.” Examples are:

  • That boosted my spirits.
  • I’m depressed.
  • It gave him a lift.
  • My heart sank.
  • Being up-beat.

Extending this pattern, health and life are up:

  • It’s time to get up.
  • He’s at the pinnacle of health.
  • Lazarus rose from the dead.
  • She sank into a coma.

More is up (this one, we even represent graphically):

  • My income rose last year.
  • The Dow reached a new high.

Having control is up:

  • He’s at the height of his powers.
  • She has control over the situation.

And so on. This metaphor is so pervasive, we don’t notice it. The other orientation pairs are embedded in the language in much the same way, and from the various concepts they signify, they form a coherent way of understanding our world.

Lakoff and Johnson also discuss how we depend on metaphor to help us structure inherently vague concepts, like emotions, in terms of more concrete things we may have directly experienced. Complex emotions, like love or anger, have inspired many overlapping (and sometimes conflicting) metaphors. For example:

  • Love (vague) is a journey (concrete).
  • Anger (vague) is hot (concrete).

The “love is a journey” metaphor underlies statements like: “We’re on the road to romance” (think Sinatra’s: “Nice ‘n’ Easy”); “It’s a rocky road to love.”; “We went in different directions.”; or “This relationship isn’t going anywhere.” The “anger is hot” metaphor leads to: “I was boiling mad”; “Cool it!”; and “in the heat of the moment.” (Icy cold anger is scary perhaps because it’s so counterintuitive.)

I’m trying to understand all this (which is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, you understand) in terms of writing. “We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor,” say Lakoff and Johnson. The orientation metaphors and their many variants perhaps explain why, a writer’s attempts to create a literary metaphor sometimes miss the mark. Perhaps they have violated this coherent, and implicit language system.

A linguistic exploration of the metaphors underlying emotion seems to me like an endorsement of the frequent dictum: “show, don’t tell.” Simply saying that a fictional character feels love or anger or happiness conveys little to the reader, because readers will have different ways—and many competing ways—of interpreting that emotion, depending on the metaphors through which they see the world. The metaphors underlying those feelings must be expressed—and in some fresh way that is consistent with the existing substrate (safer) or totally new, stretching both writer and reader.

Read more at: The Literary Link and, for some juicy literary metaphors, Welcome to the World of Metaphor.

Suzanne

Sara Forestier, Adele Haenel, Suzanne, film

Sara Forestier and Adele Haenel in Suzanne (France, 2013) (photo:i2.wp.com)

For your Netflix list – Suzanne (trailer), a 2013 French film directed by Katell Quillévéré (review here). Shown at the Trenton International Film Festival last weekend, Suzanne is an unsentimental character study of a young woman who makes all the wrong choices. The performances by all four main characters, and the young actors who play Suzanne’s son at different ages are all remarkable. The award-winning actors Sara Forestier and Adèle Haenel play the title character and her sister Maria. “And you know that she’s half crazy, but that’s why you want to be there.”  Rotten Tomatoes rating: 90%.

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What Lies Beneath

Last week I wrote about the interview with Charles Baxter and his thoughts on story endings. I recognized his name at once as the author of a wonderful book—and if you are a writer of any kind whatsoever, you should phone your local independent book store immediately and order it—The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. It’s part of the Graywolf Press “The Art of . . .” series, which Baxter edits.

Baxter calls subtext “the realm of what haunts the imagination: the implied, the half-visible, and the unspoken.” It takes a great deal of “surface bric-a-brac,” Baxter says, to indicate what is not being explicitly shown. Perhaps it’s counterintuitive, but hyperdetailing provides the revelation, not the invocation of great abstractions. He describes how this can be accomplished—infinitely easier to read about than to achieve, I assure you—in the book’s six essays. Readers, too, will find a lot to think about. In my case, in the “what all have I been missing?!” category.

The first essay is about staging—where people are “in the set.” Like actors on stage, a lot is revealed by who is sitting close to whom, who is listening, who reaches out a protective hand, who looks away. Body language. When characters speak, we may learn as much from how a line is delivered as from the words themselves. Literary fiction pays attention to all this and provides the reader a rich human experience; what I think of as “airport novels” don’t bother, and people who write four novels a year can’t.

Another essay talks about the unheard. People in real life often simply do not hear information that is threatening or stress-inducing. Or they don’t pay attention to others’ conversation because they are listening to their own interior dialog. Such non- or semi-listening may cause a character’s response to seem off point. It never is. It’s just a different point. And sometimes a character may want to steer the conversation elsewhere. And for a reason.

I have a post-it on my computer that reads “No Tennis Matches!” Writing dialog isn’t just about lobbing the conversational ball back and forth. Realistic conversation has digressions, slips of the tongue, interruptions, unexpected associations.

Here’s a conversation from Witness,* in which the two speakers—Matchmaker Marisa and Reluctant Genie—deliberately pursue separate agendas. Like two sides playing tug-of-war, each becomes increasingly insistent on controlling the contest. Genie’s final comment suggests she was listening all along. (Wally is her editor.)

“Leo should be here any minute.” Marisa gave Genie a sideways glance, accompanied by a sly smile.

“Tell me about this restaurant Riccardo is taking you to.”

“It’s a shame the two of you cannot join us.” Marisa came and sat on the low white-leather sofa across from her friend.

“It opened recently, he said. Read any reviews?”

“Leo is a very special man.” Marisa studied her manicure. “Riccardo says he’s been lonely.”

“If you like the place, take notes, and I’ll add it to my article.” Genie’s laugh was pitched a few notes higher than usual. The door buzzer sounded. “And here he is, with news of the world.”

Other essays in this engaging collection describe how to bring subtext to the surface, moving into the metaphorical, using facial expressions to show what’s going on inside, and “creating a scene,” in which he says, “In fiction we want to have characters create scenes that in real life we would typically avoid.” Every time I read Baxter’s book (at least three times now) I see new ways his insights could deepen my own writing and reading experience. Highly recommended!

*Witness is my unpublished suspense novel out looking for an agent.

A Writer’s Ear

Just finished Reading Elizabeth George’s A Traitor to Memory, one of her Inspector Lynley mysteries. (722 pages, by the way, which makes it practically a saga by today’s standards.) What struck me most in the writing was the dialog, which moved front-and-center upon introduction of a secondary character, a young California woman. Until she spoke, I had fallen unawares into George’s U.K. speech rhythms and word choices—except for the odd “boot,” “nappy,” and the like. The contrast started me noticing how “British” everyone else’s speech was.

It isn’t just how Libby Neale speaks, it’s what she chooses to speak about that makes her so distinctively American. If something is on her mind, she says it. By contrast, the British characters are painfully reserved, which serves them well, because many of them are lying, anyway. Here are Libby and the main character, violin virtuoso Gideon Davies:

“What’s up then? You don’t look so great. Aren’t you cold? What’re you doing out here without a sweater?

Looking for answers, I thought.

She said, “Hey! Anyone home? I’m, like, talking to you here.”

I said, “I needed a walk.”

She said, “You saw the shrink today, didn’t you?”

And here’s how the Gideon’s violin teacher asks about the psychiatric visit, starting with a comment from Gideon:

“You were told to get me out of the house today.”

He didn’t deny it. “[Your father] thinks you’re dwelling too much on the past and avoiding the present.”

“What do you think?”

“I trust Dr. Rose. At least I trust Dr. Rose the father. As to Dr. Rose the daughter, I assume she’s discussing the case with him . . . He’s had decades of experience with the sort of thing you’re going through, and that’s going to count for something with her.”

“What sort of thing do you think I’m going through?”

“I know what she’s called it. The amnesia bit.”

“Dad told you?”

“He would do, wouldn’t he? I’m as much involved with your career as anyone.”

At the pace these two waltz around the subject, no wonder it took 722 pages to complete the story!

After the breath of fresh Pacific Coast air that Libby brought to the conversation, I began noticing what a great job George does with dialog for all her characters, and not just the familiar contrast between Inspector Lynley (8th Earl of Asherton) and his working-class partner, Constable Barbara Havers. This story contains an East German refugee who has perfected her English accent, but not quite mastered word order, lower-class accents of two young toughs from the council flats, and a younger woman who speaks differently and more directly than her older lover of the same social class. None of them devolves into caricature.

Going further, the characters’ actions often reflect the same turn of mind that their words do. Libby goes off half-cocked, intuition leads her astray, and her last impulsive act detonates the book’s conclusion. Careful language is appropriate to the characters taking time to get their stories straight. The precise German is putting her romantic ducks in a row.

The slang in this book, published in 2001, will become dated as the years pass, but remains fresh twelve years on. Meanwhile, it feels like we’re reading about real-live, unique individuals, with their own unique energy behind them, energy that leads to the actions only they would take. For a writer, inspirational, really.

What We Know

@ Death Valley, July 2012

My writers’ group—eight to twelve of us who get together every month to provide critiques, commiseration, celebration, and snacks—tried a storytelling exercise this week. (This was after a brief mental warm-up: describing an eighth dwarf for Snow White. “Sleazy” cheated at poker and was always trying to get Snow White alone.) Our main challenge for the evening was to briefly describe “the strangest thing that has ever happened to us or the oddest thing we have ever seen.”

Two hours in, we were still going strong. One hitchhiking escapade with a dodgy driver that ended in Death Valley could have been recorded almost verbatim as a complete short story. Others were pieces of narrative that might launch a whole symphony or be used in some work as incidental music: People and things that disappeared mysteriously. Ghost stories. Clairvoyants. A whole subcategory of jaw-dropping pet shenanigans.

The point of all this was to show ourselves that we have amazing, interesting stuff inside. We’ve had experiences. We’ve had emotional peaks and troughs. And we can draw on these in our own writing, much like the most uxorious actor, if he were cast as Othello, might seek out and magnify into mountainous proportions one minor wifely flaw. One member of our group could reconstruct her terror when locked in a room with a noisy ghost; another might recreate the merriment of family misadventures in Olde England; one has given the fear she felt when being stalked to her fictional character in a related situation.

This, I think, is how the often misunderstood dictum, “write what you know” should be interpreted. When it is taken too literally, it is patently absurd. Not to mention boring. “Another fascinating day in front of the computer, interrupted by a run to the grocery store. A literal milk run! Received 72 emails. Decided not to order FiOS.”

Writers can and should ground their writing in the emotions they know, distilling and intensifying them to the right pitch. We don’t have to write dully about emotions, we can write with them. Ready-to-tap, in full array, they are buried in the experiences that have amazed, amused, shocked, warmed, and frightened each of us. Two hours of round-robin storytelling proved the point. While none of the anecdotes we told each other this week will ever appear as a complete story—except perhaps the one about the wayward hitchhiker—we can filter the feelings these events inspired through new fictional situations and watch them emerge in emotionally compelling new guises.

Want to try it yourself?