Magic and Myth

Happy Christmas? Got an Oscar Wilde action figure. You? Plans for New Years? 80s-themed night at the local with my bro and sis. You?

Awkward small talk regarding the holidays sorted. Good.

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (or my last blog post), I wrote a scene about a crazy girl in a bar and didn't really know what to do with it. Well.

I've been thinking about a story for a while that's sort of a martial arts/samurai version of this story from ancient Greek myth. Well, I've had the idea since I watched Kill Bill and wanted to imitate Tarantino probably (keep you posted on my superhero idea clearly only inspired by Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said 'good writers borrow, great writers steal?' Or was it Pablo Picasso who said 'good artists borrow, great artists steal?' Or was it T.S. Eliot who said 'immature poets borrow, mature poets steal?' No matter. They were awesome and condoned creative theft. Hmmm. Seems wrong somehow.

I digress. So the myth goes something like this; Daedalus, master craftsman and constructor of the labyrinth, is pretty sure he's the business at crafting shit. Until his sister's kid comes along. His name is Perdix and Perdix is super good at building stuff and this makes Daedalus well jealous. So one day while they're walking along some cliffs, hanging and chilling, Daedalus decides to push Perdix off one. A cliff, that is. In the myth I read the kid just plain died and Daedalus was banished, which is how he wound up building the labyrinth. But in the one I just looked up (cough, on Wikipedia, cough), the goddess Athena turned the kid into a bird before he hit the ground. This is supposedly the origin of the Partridge. The bird, not the family of musicians from the 70s.

How are these things related, you might ask? Well. I think the girl has the makings of being a Perdix character, looking for her Daedalus. I wanted to do a story about an assassin who kills one of his students because she's clearly going to be better than him. She survives and begins picking off the members of his organisation before killing him. The cliff stuff is genius, because the scene I've written already has that. In the myth, Daedalus is branded with the image of Perdix as punishment and I thought maybe this could be her mark? He pushes her off a cliff, she somehow survives, and exacts her revenge. There's a definite fight/flight motif running through this story (thank you, friend who talked about the fight or flight urge and how you can have one more than the other), and it can be seen in the original scene I wrote. And it's explicit in the one I'm about to share with you.

So this story is shaping up first of all to be about art, how we validate ourselves through our work and what it means when someone does better what we thought was ours alone, but also about our instincts; that constant tension between fight and flight that we live through every day and how others force us to enact those struggles every day. Please to enjoy the next scene I haves written!

An explanatory note (well, another one): I haven't written it as a scene in a film. I've written it as a monologue, then added directions. It's more notes on how to write the scene more than anything. Please to enjoy! Again!

It's the flight or fight complex. That survival instinct that kicks in when you know that if you walk into this territory you'll end up with a gun to your head or a knife to your throat.

What I've figured out is that no one has both. Oh, they'll try to tell you it's a constant struggle between the two, but that's bullshit. BULLSHIT.

See, to me, the real struggle comes from the realisation that in the moment flight or fight comes upon you, you're not who you thought you were.

When I was a kid, I had the drunken arsehole of a father who would start shit when he got home from the pub. I would stand up to him while my brother went and hid in his closet. That's how I learned that while my brother's instinct was flight, mine was to fight.

And that's why I'm so good at what we do. I know who is flight, and who is fight. And I know when someone realises that when they thought they'd be fight, they're actually flight. And you my dear, I'm afraid I know exactly what you are. You're flight.

This is dialogue, delivered direct address-style to the camera. It's our opening scene, our opening shot. In CU we see a middle-aged man. He looks tough. Battle-weary. Street-smart.

We pull back to an MCU and we see the landscape for the first time. It has large rocky mountaintops and cliffs filled with sharp points like raised daggers covering its surface. It is beautiful but treacherous. We CUT TO the person he has been talking to.

It's the girl from the bar with the wild red hair. Blue eyes like a cold flame. Now, though, she looks as though every inch of her is vibrating with fear.

He pushes her off the cliff.

And now I need to know where to go from here. Yay!

I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us.

Do you ever think that people aren't really people, but merely points along your personal narrative? Visual cues designed to allow the protagonist, i.e. you, to move forward?


A lady at the bus stop began talking to me about her mother, Lucy, who had terrible asthma but the loveliest singing voice. The neighbours knew when she was home for the day. “Lucy's home today,” they'd say. Instead of being the kind of neighbours who'd tell this woman to shut the fuck up, they enjoyed the sound of someone genuinely joyful.


She also told me about the time her mother was ridiculed for wearing a beret to church (not a proper hat), and when she couldn't afford to put money in the collection plate, she didn't go. She took her daughter outside where they could hear the service and they sang along in their backyard. Everyone missed her. The priest asked her about her absence and she said she didn't have a hat. The next week, the priest gave a sermon and said something like, “it's important to worship God, it doesn't matter what you wear on your head when you do it.” lucy was embarrassed.


Lucy also made cakes and sweets all the time, randomly. She'd tell her daughter to invite her friends around for afternoon tea. She always made desserts for their local doctor, who drove past their house every night on his way home. He'd just come in and eat dessert. It wasn't unusual to wake up in the morning and find him alseep on their lounge. She also told me about a teacher who'd pretend to keep her after class so that the other children wouldn't see that her lunch was wrapped in newspaper, and one day in class mentioned that some of the great figures of the past may have been so poor that their food was wrapped in newspaper.


She said she found herself thinking of those times fondly, because even though at the time it seemed embarrassing, horrible and unfair, she realised how lucky she was. Her mother's beautiful voice, the afternoon teas, the kind teachers. She could only appreciate it for what it was now that she was older.


And I thought; is sentimentalism such a bad thing? Or is it just another way of telling ourselves we don't need what we can't have? We're poor, so we decide that there are more important things in life than being rich, and we comfort ourselves with the idea that rich people are unhappy (so much so that some rich people buy into it). We tell an infinite number of stories to reconcile ourselves to some depressing fact. We die, so we develop an afterlife that promises to be even better. Or we talk about the value of living life to the fullest. We warn ourselves that the worst part of committing a crime is the effect it has on your soul, or your conscience.


Woody Allen explores this idea in Crimes And Misdemeanors (and in a less refined way in Match Point). What if there is no inner moral code? What if the only thing keeping us from committing dreaful acts is the fear of getting caught? And what happens if we realise this is true?
The basic storyline is this: Martin Landau is at a party. He strikes up a conversation with a documentary filmmaker, played by Woody Allen. He tells him the story of a man who is having an affair (with Anjelica Huston, no less). The mistress becomes obssessed, convinced that they need to be together and that he needs to tell his wife of the affair and leave her. He can't do it. Instead, he decides that the best thing to do is to have her taken care of. He hires his dodgy brother to do it.


He is racked with guilt. He sees his other brother, Sam Waterston, going blind. He has committed a sin and is receiving no punishment, while his priest is being punished, seemingly for his commitment to God. He considers turning himself in, his life is in ruins, everything is wrong and then suddenly, he just gets over it. He stops feeling guilty. He realises that he isn't going to get caught. And he's fine.


He asks Woody Allen's character what he thinks that means. Allen responds that it is Man's worst nightmare realised. If we have no moral compass, no conscience, in effect no soul, then it is the ultimate proof that God doesn't exist.


These questions and the texts that adress them always come back to religion. This is an ultimately horrific idea – that there is no innate need to be moral. I think it is, too, but no text ever really just lets this idea wash over people. Even a text like The Picture of Dorian Gray (oh, how I love it!) eventually surmises that we cannot rid ourselves of the consequences of our misdeeds.


The question at the heart of the novel is this: what would we do if we could see the corruption of our soul? Would we use it as an ever present guide, ensuring our soul stayed in perfect condition? Or would we let it bear the burden of our sins, and merely watch it's degradation with fascination? If our soul is separate from us, do we ever really have to deal with the consequences of our choices in life?


Wilde decides in this instance to say no, we can never free ourselves from these consequences. What Dorian thought would free him from his inhibitions and his restraint becomes his prison. He lives with the constant fear that someone will discover his terrible secret. He begins to live a double life. He murders a man to hide it. And in the end it makes him paranoid. And it kills him (well, he essentially kills himself by killing the picture which has become his soul).


Wilde's idea, that the consequences of our actions become manifest in our physical features, was merely a dramatic expression of widely-held thought. There are a lot of other things going on in this book (our immersion in art, the double-standards of society of the time, etc), but this is what fascinates me at the moment – no text that explores the idea of what it means to be moral, and the ways in which human beings use myth and art to console themselves to their situation, ever really wants to say 'No, there's no innate need to be moral. There are no consequences. You really are wrong about things.'


I guess one film and book that does actually leave this idea with you is No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (film directed by the Coen brothers). The end of that film suggests that this is merely the way it is. Sometimes, people don't get what they deserve. There will always be things that are horrifying. There are things, and people, in this world that defy understanding or belief. Why does that shock us so much when we see it in art?


Which brings me to my point. I had an idea for a story that does this. The myth that the poor are richer for having friends and family and for understanding that money isn't important. Rich people put too much emphasis on money and as a result, lose all the things that should matter. In the end, all they have is their money and this makes them profoundly unhappy.
People sometimes forget that in a capitalist society (sorry guys, but that's what we're living in. In the West, anyway), money can sometimes mean freedom. But anyway. Maybe I just want to rip off Crimes and Misdemeanors and make it even more depressing. But is that a bad thing?