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concrete reality, himself
Dec. 16th, 2010 01:01 amI really enjoyed my script class and I learned a lot from it, and I enjoyed being in that kind of place with that kind of collaborative creative energy. It was great. But now that it's over, I can admit that I felt uncomfortable at times. The ratio was 3:1 men to women, and out of the 4 women in the class one never spoke, and all of the guys were college-aged hipsters. This led to a bit of an imbalance in the class, I felt, which was made extremely obvious when most of the class discussions about a script in which a man and a woman had some sort of disagreement involved at least one "He should punch her!" joke.
The problem is that it's not always easy to speak up and say, "Hey, that's not really a funny joke, it's really misogynist." I ended up trying to point that out with critique--"Well, okay, so she cheated on him, but she only gets two lines, and she doesn't even get to defend herself, which makes a really unsatisfying imbalance between their characters...and him throwing her out of the house naked really doesn't make him a sympathetic character. So, no, I don't think him punching her as well would add much to the script." Of course, this doesn't work, because once there's a group dynamic where chick-punching jokes are okay, it's hard to derail that with calm constructive critique, and I don't have the balls to directly stand up and say "Fuck critique, y'all's sexist." Especially when the prof is laughing. (I liked the prof. I liked him a lot. But I think he's not used to teaching people who are enthusiastic and have a comfortable group dynamic, so he tends to go along with jokes even when they're not very nice jokes.)
In one of the last classes, we watched a short documentary called "Talk Fast." It was about a group of people taking a pitch class in Los Angeles. They were terrible. The people in them seemed broken somehow--people who pinned all of their hopes on a single screenplay they'd been developing for decades that had terrible, unworkable concepts, or who wanted to tell the story of their lives but couldn't accept that unadulterated lives generally make poor narrative arcs, that people are interested in stories, not their past trauma.
It made me wonder about the scripts some of the guys were bringing in--so many of them were about teenage/twentysomething guys either having inane conversations or dealing with girls who'd broken their hearts somehow. It got boring. Sometimes, with a certain type of writer, it seems like the most honest or meaningful story is supposed to be about your own life...but I don't necessarily want to write about my own life. I don't like the idea of turning it into a story, simply because, well, stories are different from life. I don't want people reading a story and thinking that it's the whole thing, that it's my unvarnished reality.
The problem is that it's not always easy to speak up and say, "Hey, that's not really a funny joke, it's really misogynist." I ended up trying to point that out with critique--"Well, okay, so she cheated on him, but she only gets two lines, and she doesn't even get to defend herself, which makes a really unsatisfying imbalance between their characters...and him throwing her out of the house naked really doesn't make him a sympathetic character. So, no, I don't think him punching her as well would add much to the script." Of course, this doesn't work, because once there's a group dynamic where chick-punching jokes are okay, it's hard to derail that with calm constructive critique, and I don't have the balls to directly stand up and say "Fuck critique, y'all's sexist." Especially when the prof is laughing. (I liked the prof. I liked him a lot. But I think he's not used to teaching people who are enthusiastic and have a comfortable group dynamic, so he tends to go along with jokes even when they're not very nice jokes.)
In one of the last classes, we watched a short documentary called "Talk Fast." It was about a group of people taking a pitch class in Los Angeles. They were terrible. The people in them seemed broken somehow--people who pinned all of their hopes on a single screenplay they'd been developing for decades that had terrible, unworkable concepts, or who wanted to tell the story of their lives but couldn't accept that unadulterated lives generally make poor narrative arcs, that people are interested in stories, not their past trauma.
It made me wonder about the scripts some of the guys were bringing in--so many of them were about teenage/twentysomething guys either having inane conversations or dealing with girls who'd broken their hearts somehow. It got boring. Sometimes, with a certain type of writer, it seems like the most honest or meaningful story is supposed to be about your own life...but I don't necessarily want to write about my own life. I don't like the idea of turning it into a story, simply because, well, stories are different from life. I don't want people reading a story and thinking that it's the whole thing, that it's my unvarnished reality.