Loving the thing you are writing has meant everything to me.
The passionate connection the narrator feels with some aspect of pleasure, even amid pain and suffering the narrator may be remarking on, that passionate connection to talk to you is a kind of love, and that is what the reader connects to. (Also the viewer in films that love the characters they portray, as do the filmmakers in the movies and shows enjoyed in today’s post.)
There are lots of other tricks in the smoke-and-mirrors tool kit to keep the reader seduced. I think love is the first principe everything rides on.
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The African Queen (1951)
The movies come to us. We open the computer and say, "Happy to see you." Once, two eagles flew around our trees in the back for an hour or so, resting on high branches. I was five the year The African Queen was released. Most of the time I feel the same unbroken line of myself I have always felt, even if I wake up in a room I don't know how I got there.
About half-way through the film, I said to Richard, "The movie is about us." I meant if you are having a good time with a person, you can steer a boat over giant rapids and blow up a German warship in East Africa. Also, it's good to start a relationship with a project.
Director John Huston wastes no time in the film. The story of an unlikely romance between a boozy boatman and a sheltered English missionary bops along, picking up momentum. Bogie is miscast. He can’t read his self-abashed lines without letting you know he thinks they’re fake. He can't be Bogie, which means he can't be sexy, and even if he could be sexy, he couldn't be sexy with Katherine Hepburn because I don't think anyone could be sexy with her. Their love still works at the level of what happens to the imagination when someone sees you as beautiful and capable of anything. The world splits open, and you walk through the crack.
We fall in love with the movie as the couple fall in love with each other. It’s such a movie movie in the sense Hitchcock would have described it, meaning camera shots tell a story without words—a shot of the “African Queen” sunk in shallows with its torpedoes still aimed, a shot of the German captain oblivious of the danger, a shot of the nooses around the necks of Bogie and Kate, tense music schmaltzing us along. We know how it has to end.
Moonlight (2016)
We watched this film for the first time the other night. What a gorgeous piece of work. It unfolds slowly, a case study of one boy, who grows to manhood. The focus is tight and specific. Don't assume anything. Don't think you know me, the film says. We don't. At the same time, because the observation of this child is so patient, absorbed, and detailed—because the film loves this boy in a way he hasn’t felt in his life—Chiron is all of us when we've felt isolated, confused, and filled with longing.
The movie, co-written with Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by Barry Jenkins, works almost like a documentary, waiting for Chiron to look into the camera and say a simple, true thing that's been welling up in him, heart beat by heart beat. The story appears to be about how a sweet, lonely boy becomes a hard man with a set of gold grills on his teeth and muscles out to here. Be destroyed by bullies or lose yourself—those are the seeming options for Black boys in the 1980s, in the crack-addled section of Miami where the film is set.
That's not what the film is about. It's a love story between Chiron (Trevante Rhodes as adult Chiron) and another boy, Kevin (André Holland as adult Kevin) who touches him with tenderness and heat. They reunite in their thirties. Chiron (now called Black) has not been touched since they made out on a beach as teenagers. Kevin is a cook, and the men meet in the diner where he works. Here’s a bit of their brilliantly paced dialogue:
Kevin : I wasn't never worth shit. Never did anything I actually wanted to do, was all I could do to do what other folks thought I should do. I wasn't never myself.
Kevin : Who is you man?
Black : Who, me?
Kevin : Yeah nigga. You. Them fronts? That car? Who is you Chiron?
Black : I'm me man. Ain't trying to be nothing else.
Kevin : So you hard now?
Black : I ain't say that.
Kevin : Then what?
[pause]
Kevin : Look. I'm not trying hem you up. Just... I ain't seen you in a minute. Not what I expected, none of it. Not good or bad. Just not what I expected.
Black : Well, what did you expect?
[pause]
Kevin : You remember the last time I saw you?
[pause]
Black : For a long time, tried not to remember. Tried to forget all those times.
[pause]
Kevin : Yeah. I know.
As a little boy, Chiron asks Juan, a drug dealer who befriends him—played with light-hearted charm by Mahershala Ali—what a "faggot" is. Juan tells him that "faggot" is a mean word for a gay person. Chiron asks, "Will I be a faggot?" Juan says, "You may be gay, but you won't be a faggot."
The subjects of Moonlight brought to mind Tongues Untied (1989), the documentary by Marlon Riggs about gay male Black culture. I don't remember the Riggs film well enough to know if the kinds of kids we see in Moonlight are included in this world. In any case, Moonlight loves a group of people we've seen rarely, if at all, in films.
Man, does creator Noah Hawley ever ❤️ Juno Temple’s character on Fargo season 5.
This season, all the old golem-with-a-scary-haircut shenanigans and men killing things on icy wastelands scenes look like watery tea brewed with old tea bags compared with the united energies of female humans cutting the legs off domestic violence and MAGA social terrorism. Go, girls. Juno Temple kills it, as she does in every part, here playing a woman pursued by her violent ex-husband and finding ways to out-tiger him (I hope, it’s not over yet!). Her husband Wayne and daughter Scotty on the show you could eat with a spoon. Plus female cops and a female billionaire (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who decides to finance team girl. The world tilts on its axis when male creators become bored with things men do and become interested in things women think.
Best Laid Plans
Thomas Hardy died on January 12, 1928. After his death, his ashes were to be buried at Westminster Abbey and his heart in his Dorset village. However the heart was left for a few minutes in the kitchen and the cat ate it. The heart (inside dead cat) is buried in St. Michael's, Stinsford.
I am preferring to think the cat was allowed to live out its nine allotted lives before, you know.
There are three buttons at the bottom of each post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” I love your comments on the topics of the pieces and on writing craft, and as a consequence of you all, the stack now has 7200 subscribers. Thank you.
Love your take on Moonlight and Fargo. We watched "Anatomy of a Fall" last night. Have you seen it? Would enjoy learning what you think/feel about this film.
The cat and Thomas Hardy’s heart...OMG! I didn’t know, and I love that soooo much! ♥️