Young Adult

Can meaning be extracted merely from living out an ordinary life in an ordinary town? Must a person be among the literary, political, entertainment, or business elite to feel fulfilled? Are the popular kids in school the happiest? If so, why does a sense of over all contentment and ongoing enjoyment seem to come easily to some people while being arduously difficult for people leading ordinary lives to attain? Are people in the elites necessarily or even just usually happier than people who live out ordinary lives by earning enough to put bread on the table and simply enjoy friends and family. Would so many people be content to live such lives without any publicized accomplishment that will outlast them if ordinary life itself were not very satisfying? The 2011 film, Young Adult, is notable for how it deals with these questions in a non-formulaic way. Aside from contrasting ordinary living in a small town with being an accomplished, albeit flawed, writer (and person) in a way that puts accomplishment above a life centered on local events like high-school football games on Friday nights and family birthday parties, the film can be read as providing a statement on how not to write a novel. That the screenwriting is so good makes this dimension possible even though the medium is film.

The main character, Mavis Gary, is a woman who is aged 37 and has divorced a man whom her parents still like. She writes short novels in the young-adult category of fiction and, in an interesting parallel, is a young adult, psychologically. That she is a heavy drinker of alcohol likely has something to do with her maturation having been artificially arrested when had passed on from having been a hot, popular girl in high school who had no time for those students-dubbed-losers. In the film, seeking in vain to get her long-past high-school boyfriend (with whom she had a miscarriage back then) Buddy to leave his wife Beth and infant daughter to rekindle the high-school romance, Mavis finds it difficult to complete the last novel in the once-popular series for young adults. Mavis’s manipulative ploys reek of young adulthood. So too, unfortunately, does her writing.

Writing does not come easy for her even though Mavis is a serial-published author. The film hints of this in the scene in which she signs one of her ghost-written books tellingly without the bookstore employee having made the request or given permission, the film’s sound amplifies, and thus hones in on, the scratchy carving of her pen into the paper of a page. By the hard sounds of the tip of the pen on the paper, the audience can get the sense that writing is arduous. In filmmaking generally, the magnification of particular, ordinary sounds by literally turning up the volume of a mic up in volume can be useful in storytelling and developing a character. As a byproduct, an audience is made more aware of ordinary things in daily life—like how the closing of a door sounds when sitting in a new car, how hard shoes sound on bricks, and even how silence can punctuate a typical conversation with meaning. Life has been an up-hill struggle for Mavis in spite of her having been one of the cool kids in school, and the scraping sound of her pen writing her own name in a book that she wrote not only suggests how she approaches writing, but also, metaphorically speaking, how difficult it has been for her to feel fulfilled.

All the manipulation that goes into Mavis’s attempt to wrest Buddy from his new family and back into her arms shows just how desperate she is to feel inner fulfillment, and she allows this angst to spill into her writing. For example, when getting Buddy back proves difficult and she realizes that she will have to take an active role in breaking up Buddy’s marriage to do so, she subverts her novel by writing, “Sometimes in order to heal, a few people have to get hurt.” Her operating assumption is that manipulation can bring about happiness rather than isolation and loneliness. The film’s screenwriter could have had Mavis repeat the line to Bill, who was one of the geek high-school  students and during the film applies superego-conscience to Mavis's manipulative selfishness He could say, “So it is ok to tell young-adult readers of your book that it is ok to hurt people in order to feel whole?” The extent to which Mavis’s mentality and values are warped would be more transparent to the audience.

Mavis’s written line speaks volumes about what not to do in writing a novel, which should not serve as a mere direction-pointer of what happens to be going on in the writer’s life, bad or good, when the writing is underway. Such a flow of consciousness is called an autobiography, not a novel. It is no surprise when the employee at the bookstore reveals to Mavis that her series is on display not because the books are selling like pancakes, but, rather, because “that series is over.” That she is writing the last book of that series nonetheless is itself a harsh verdict on her books.

It is only after Sandra, Bill’s sister who looked up to the popular Mavis in high school, recalibrates Mavis’s perception of herself on the morning after Mavis has had unsatisfying sex with Bill after having been humiliated by Buddy at his daughter’s “non-religious naming ceremony” that Mavis recognizes that even her own mediocre accomplishment was at least an accomplishment. Sandra points out that no one else in that small town of bars and fast-food restaurants—Mercury, Minnesota—has or could do anything as noteworthy as writing a series of books. Mavis has had no clue on just how ordinary, banal, and unaccomplished, and therefore meaningless, the people are in the small town. They don’t really care if they die, Sandra explains, because they know it won’t matter whether or when they die because they haven’t accomplished anything noteworthy. The attitude expressed by the film itself depreciates this kind of mere existence. “This town blows,” an astonished and awakened Mavis exclaims to Sandra, who is satisfied that her message has been received. At the naming ceremony, Buddy gives his wife a drum-set, after all. Oh joy! Any push-back from this critique of people who live ordinary lives of putting bread on the table is utterly lacking in the film. Instead, Mavis is portrayed as a heroine when she stands up in Sandra’s (and Bill’s) kitchen and announces that it is time to go back to the big city in Minnesota. She even puts Sandra in her place as fitting well in the ordinariness of Mercury by refusing Sandra’s plea, “Take me with you!” The film does not consider that Sandra and Mavis may be wrong in viewing the people who have stayed in Mercury as useless losers whose ordinary lives amount to nothing. The message of the film is that making a noteworthy accomplishment makes living fulfilling, whereas selfish manipulation and living an ordinary life are recipes for unhappiness. Even though it is good to see Mavis wake up and be suddenly refreshed about life rather than commit suicide or die from driving drunk, I contend that meaning from ordinary living is inordinately dismissed in the film.

A certain sort of fulfilment can only come from an un-noticed and relatively unassuming life of lifelong friends and plenty of extended relatives nearby and therefore of get-togethers. To be sure, the day-in, day-out drudgery of banal work, however, is much more difficult to justify. If only more people would know and be matched with their passion, the world would be a happier place. Aside from the drudgery involved in having to put bread on the table, retain health insurance, and save for the kids’ college-education, ordinary life can be fulfilling. If brought out more in the film, such ubiquitous, long-standing and thus subtle comfort could contend with the alleged happiness (or value of living) that is known only to an accomplished member of a societal elite. Hypothetically, a person raised as a spoiled, immature, and discontented child from Rockford, Illinois, for example, could go on to be a rich partner of a Hollywood talent agency and live with utter disdain for the people still living in the sordid rust-belt city of high crime and unemployment that lies to the west of even the outer suburbs of Chicago (and thus civilization); such a person could easily look down on her relatives even if they were not all merely ordinary in terms of noteworthy accomplishment. Even all the wealth and the contact with popular film actors (many of whom may, it turns out, be utterly unhappy as fakes, even amid all their earthly possessions) that unnaturally comes with working at a high level in Hollywood, and all the pleasure that comes from feeling distain and thus superior generally may not be enough to erase the inner and outer isolation and reach the level of fulfilment that simply requires a certain maturation and friendly continence.  Such rare finds can arguably be found amid fame and famine, in big, accomplished cities as well as in small, uneventful towns. In cheering on Mavis’ return to the mini-apple and blowing off the ordinary people who reside in Mercury, the film does not proffer enough balance to support a dialectic of two very different ways of being fulfilled (instead, the film is ideologically prescriptive). Had the filmmakers constructed a balanced dialectic for the film, the screenplay could have been written in such a way that the narrative could arrive at identifying the underlying substratum that undergirds happiness itself, with Mavis realizing a sense of comfort in her own skin regardless of the context.

Shadows in the Sun

Challenging the dichotomy between reading a book and watching a movie, a film can include writing lessons within a narrative that is oriented to a romance and the business of a publishing house signing a writer for a second book. In the film, Shadows in the Sun (2005), Jeremy, a young employee of a major publisher, is sent by his brass, business-minded boss, Andrew Benton, to sign Weldon Parish, who lives hundreds of miles away from London and has retired from writing due to his fear of failure. In resisting Jeremy’s efforts to manipulate him to sign, Parish agrees to talk shop with the young writer. Although by no means a major part of the film, Weldon’s brief lessons and exercises can be of use to viewers. Film can indeed serve the cause of writing rather than merely draw readers away from books to the screen. In fact, astute viewers can critique the brief lessons and thus actively make use of film for intellectual and vocational purposes. Going through the lessons and exercises in the film can illustrate such an active engagement.

The first lesson occurs when Weldon and Jeremy are looking out at a beautiful sunset over an impressive landscape. Weldon suggests that Jeremy think of words as colors, and the paper as the canvas. The accomplished, elder writer demonstrates how words can be utilized as such, by describing the sunset in the following words: “The sunset, slowly, (is) igniting the sky in fiery shades of red and orange; in the distance, dark clouds rolled over the horizon, riding the summer winds. Soon day will give way to night, and with it will come the silence that washes over everything.” Besides the problematic grammatical lapses, which I submit are problematic even if done for stylistic purposes, Weldon goes off topic when he slides into describing the night, which obviously does not include the sunset. Regarding the sunset itself, the clouds are arguably not dark. If he is overstating the darkness here, perhaps the shadows in his published book, Shadow Dancers, are also overstated. On a macro or “meta” level, perhaps the film’s title, Shadows in the Sun, overstates the salience of the metaphor of shadow in the film. Weldon misses completely the beautiful colored reflection of the sky on the fields below. Those colors are as vibrant as the orange and yellow part of the sky nearest to the sliver of sun. In fact, the colors in the sky and on the fields make for a rustic overall hue. In hurrying into the night, the writer’s “painting” of the sunset in words falls short.

The inattentiveness to detail is all the more significant because of what Weldon teaches Jeremy on the importance of drawing on one’s own experiences in writing. “If you’re writing a fight scene,” Weldon explains, “it helps if you have been in a fight.” Weldon then asks Jeremy to describe being hit in the stomach. Not impressed, Weldon proceeds to punch his de facto apprentice so Jeremy can experience being hit in stomach. Sure enough, Jeremy is then able to flush out the details that he had missed for lack of experience, like snot coming out of one’s nose and the watering of one’s eyes. The film’s screenwriter could have had Jeremy subsequently ask Weldon whether a writer should be bound by one’s experience; Weldon himself mentions the role of imagination in writing.

The lessons then move beyond technique to what makes a writer great. Such a writer finds that part of oneself that has something to say. “You know when you’ve found it,” Weldon says. Jeremy has not found it in himself, so he is dissatisfied with his writing. Weldon tries another way of making his point. “Art is not something you choose to do; it’s something that chooses you.” Good writing comes out of an irresistible urge to say or express something in particular; both the urge and the content lies within, so the challenge is to find or realize it. Even if experience does not limit what a writer can write about in detail, that which a writer is passionate about is limited, it does not come from the will, as if a writer could choose that which must be written. In writing short essays, I try to restrict myself to points I feel strongly about expressing; I resist writing just to keep the essays coming.

Knowing that Jeremy has fallen in love with Isabella, who is one of Weldon’s daughters, Weldon asks Jeremy to describe her face. The point is to try to put in words that which one is passionate about. Jeremy makes the following attempt: “Sunlight frames her body in a golden glow of honey light while the wind dances gently through the long strands of her hair. Her face is strong, proud, with eyes that don’t easily give away their secrets. It’s a face that doesn’t call out, but softly beckons.” Although Weldon is impressed, this coloring with words can be critiqued. First of all, Isabella is framed by grass rather than any “glow of honey light”—this description of light may itself be overdone. Sunlight does not frame her body; rather, green grass does. Furthermore, her hair is not long, and she has it in a pony tail so it is not dancing with the wind. As for her strong, proud face, her broad jaw bones do give that impression. As for eyes not giving away their secrets, her facial expressions vividly and straightforwardly show her disproval of the mischief of her father and Jeremy and then her affection for both men, obviously different in kind. In fact, her blue eyes sparkle such that they fill out her marvelous smile, but Jeremy misses this rather obvious point. As for a face that does not call out, I must confess that don’t know what a face that calls out looks like; I’m equally at a loss with regard to a face that softly beckons; usually people beckon with their arms and hands. So maybe it is for the best that I don’t write novels.

My point is that potential and even actual writers can learn how to write better from Weldon’s mini-lessons and exercises in the film by interiorizing these and going on to critique them. The medium of non-documentary, fictional film can be actively engaging for viewers both intellectually in terms of added knowledge and vocationally in terms of improved work-product.