I finally came to embrace movies about the Old West because, I gradually realized, they define the grand American mythos, whether we like it or not. We have inherited these stories, and need to make sense of them—because they tell us things about ourselves that we won't learn any other way.
When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power — upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane.
Reading a novel don't always make us more moral, for instance—although my moral intuitions have been shaped by reading about the adulterous affairs of Russian aristocrats, and the political idealism of Norwegian PR consultants. The modest claim I'll make here is that novels and films have made me a better person, through the obscure mechanisms of style and form and story, and I'll never be without them again.
All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed.
For a start, the Odyssey was the first time a hero in Western culture was celebrated for smarts and cunning—and not just fighting and violence. It was as if Homer had grown up after creating the Iliad (in which 239 characters, identified by name, meet their death), and decided to tell a more civilized tale.
This peculiar man took ads in the newspaper, offering to hire "talkers" who would tell him the wildest and most intimate details of their lives. The end result was a diary with more than 1,000 characters—striving with one another to provide the most compelling, uncensored narrative.
After the finale, what's left isn't the euphoria you get from so many series. It's the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.
Moral grey attempts to capture the unflattening of heroes and villains into complex characters who waver, err, and do not always live up to their ideals or our expectations of either pole.
So many of my interviews these days feel like jousting with someone's soul, trying to get to the personal core of what makes them an artist. But I also love these interviews where the premise is, essentially, tell me a story so I can commit it to history.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
