A few friends go out to see True Grit, a western. They’re hyped up for action. They’re set for loaded guns and bountiful facial hair, enough to hijack trains. They’re ready for loose women in states of undress. The world is good.
But when the friends leave the theater they’re shaking their heads. Nary a bustline in sight. And while the body count was acceptable, nothing to laugh at, there’s the sense that the film was in some way deficient.
“A disappointment,” one says.
“Not what I was expecting.”
“What was the point?”
Witness the “so what?” event. Observe as it retrospectively circles, this vulture, before winging itself down to settle and scavenge, to pick the bare bones and empty sockets of so many of our less fortunate fictions.
I’d like to pick the brains of someone very close to this blog, so please forgive me my vulturous, somewhat circular descent. Randall Brown wrote about the “so what?” phenomenon in flash a little more than a year ago. To keep the “so what?” beast, vulture, whatever at bay, he offers us five suggestions: employ traditional narrative structures; have something different arrive; use the title as a thesis; reveal meaning to the privileged reader; put poetry and rewarding language into practice. Read more about them here.
No doubt those delightfully crafty Coen Brothers, like Randall, know the tricks of their trade. True Grit’s narrative structure is traditional and sound. The inciting incident is clearly defined and initiates difference. The title directs the viewer down a path of interpretation. The filmic language, both as dialogue and cinematography, surprises.
I wonder, though, if the viewer is treated to a meaning unknown to the characters, or as Randall writes, “a revelation that belongs only to the reader” or viewer. Does True Grit relate a special, secret meaning to its audience? I wonder, also…can privileged gratification become a cheap way out in film, and when? With sex and violence? With CGI? This raises the question, does flash have its own equivalent of an easy escape?
The stakes are so extraordinarily high in compressed fiction. Already working with an irregular form, the writer is impelled to make room where there is none for traditional narrative structure; to produce difference, almost without introducing it, in the middle of medias res; to find a thesis in a title, in a handful words; to startle with poetic language without depreciating meaning. And this meaning, on top of everything else, must satisfy a desire that the reader implicitly carries within. To deliver an easy and gratifying revelation, I would think, under these heightened circumstances must seem a seductively promising escape.
A great problem of compressed fiction, perhaps, is how to meet the reader’s exacting wants while still engendering, as Henry James puts it, “a miraculous enlargement of experience.”
In other words, how do we squeeze (compress) expansion from a limited space as well as an audience thirsting, in their private desert, for a specific set of meanings?
A prompt:
Write toward an easy, satisfying revelation. Then, at last, complicate matters by pulling away from that anticipated meaning. Reroute epiphany.