cosina
"I think being a woman is like being Irish." — Iris Murdoch
books There must be a word for it...
A story I like to tell from back in high school: We had read Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie, and the discussion was all about whether the "gentleman caller" was a nice guy or a jerk. People got very heated, and it suddenly hit me: We were talking about this as though it really happened.
Usually when we discussed a play we talked about other stuff: symbols, or structure, or foreshadowing, or some other technical point.
But here, it was all about "Did he do her wrong?"
Which put that play (at least for me) into a separate category. People consistently tend to forget that they saw or read a play. They miss the artifice: they react to what happened, as if it was a real event.
I mention it because last night Nelson wanted to watch the movie The Lookout. It was good, but when I was about to blog, I realized that I was thinking of Jeff Daniels and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the only "actors" in it (they were the only ones I recognized) but the others -- in my mind -- were real people.
I was actually shouting at the end, "Come on, Chris! Get the damn gun! Chris!" and at the beginning, "Turn the lights on! Turn the damn lights on! NOOOO!"
The point being: The Lookout passes the miss-the-artifice test.
A story I like to tell from back in high school: We had read Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie, and the discussion was all about whether the "gentleman caller" was a nice guy or a jerk. People got very heated, and it suddenly hit me: We were talking about this as though it really happened.
Usually when we discussed a play we talked about other stuff: symbols, or structure, or foreshadowing, or some other technical point.
But here, it was all about "Did he do her wrong?"
Which put that play (at least for me) into a separate category. People consistently tend to forget that they saw or read a play. They miss the artifice: they react to what happened, as if it was a real event.
I mention it because last night Nelson wanted to watch the movie The Lookout. It was good, but when I was about to blog, I realized that I was thinking of Jeff Daniels and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the only "actors" in it (they were the only ones I recognized) but the others -- in my mind -- were real people.
I was actually shouting at the end, "Come on, Chris! Get the damn gun! Chris!" and at the beginning, "Turn the lights on! Turn the damn lights on! NOOOO!"
The point being: The Lookout passes the miss-the-artifice test.
