When a Locket Means More than a Locket

Last month, Older Daughter and I went to our first midnight movie together: the opening night of J.J. Abrams' Super 8. She's old enough now to recognize that movies are not just for entertainment; they can be as rich and meaningful as the best of narratives. Take away the pages, the words, the chapters and the binding, books and movies are awful lot alike. If you engage with the film's story as you would a novel or a piece of creative non-fiction, you might find a rich subtext where the filmmaker weaves ideas and messages through the cinematic images. Of course, some movies are pure pop (Transformers, Horrible Bosses), offering not much more than a visual, emotional or comedic thrill. But others give us more by taking on symbol and theme.

Take Super 8, for example. In what some may perceive as simply a high-concept, popcorn movie (an alien on the loose in small-town Ohio), director/screenwriter addresses the thematic idea of emotional repression. Here's the story: Joe, a middle-school kid, and his friends decide to spend the summer making a Super 8 zombie movie, but during a nighttime shoot at their town's train depot, the teenagers witness a horrific train derailment. The scene is captured by their rolling camera and three days later when the film is developed (this all takes place in the 1970's, an era when all film had to be developed in a photo lab), Joe discovers that some kind of monster -- later revealed as a captured alien turned lab rat -- escaped from one of the train cars.

Sounds like your typical summer blockbuster -- and it is. But then, there's this locket. As the movie opens, we learn that Joe's mother as been killed on the job at the steel mill: the first extended sequence takes place post-funeral as friends and neighbors gather at Joe's home. While his repressed father stands in the house, Joe seeks refuge on the swing outside in the snow, fingering a locket that contains a picture of his mother. After Joe's father throws out a guest -- the man who he deems responsible for his wife's death -- Joe snaps shut the locket as the film goes to black. And in case you missed the importance of the closed locket (the film is not subtle --not at all -- but the heavy hand isn't enough to spoil the great moments throughout), there's a loud, echoing boom (the locket slamming shut) on the soundtrack.

In several other spots, the locket reappears (the cameo makes a cameo) and becomes the central symbol of the film. Joe's father, unable or unwilling to express his grief with anyone, wants him to go away from the summer; Joe wants to stay and make the zombie movie. He doesn't speak of his mother to his friends, even thought it's a small town and everybody knows of Joe's misfortune. But Joe keeps that locket, which remains closed, near throughout the movie. And remember, there's his mother's picture in there.

So the locket becomes a reminder that Joe (and of course, his father) remain hopelessly closed off from processing the pain caused by the death of the mother. Later, Joe pursues his crush on Alice Dainard (played effortlessly by Elle Fanning whose performance may be the best thing in the movie), who has been cast as the female romantic lead in the zombie film. Alice is the daughter of the man who called in sick to the mill which led to Joe's mother being called in to work on her day off (the same man thrown out of the funeral reception by Joe's father) and she reveals, in a scene where Joe shows her Super 8 home movies of his mother playing with him when he was an infant, that her father also has been devastated by grief -- yet another emotionally repressed character. As Joe and Alice bond, he shows her the locket; he's getting closer to symbolically opening the locket and consequently, himself.

SPOILER ALERT: This domestic drama is interrupted by the presence of the alien monster escaped from the army train in the derailment and now messing with the town by stealing engines from cars, scaring off dogs and scrambling electricity. And he's got his own version of the locket. In a fairly contrived turn of the plot, Joe and his buddies get their hands on some research films that reveal the monster has been held in captivity for years, the subject of intense research by the government. One scientist suspects that the alien is aggressively violent only because it's scared and homesick. And yet again, a third (or fourth or fifth) character who's cut off, shutting down, acting out.

Emotional repression; it's the big idea of Super 8. And it's a summer blockbuster -- who would have thunk it?

In the end, when the kids go AWOL to find the alien, when Joe's father frantically searches for his missing son, when Mr. Dainard reaches out to Joe's father in an effort to save his daughter, the characters begin to emote and connect, leading to the resolution of the alien invasion. The locket makes a final appearance in the last moments of the film; what happens to it suggests that Joe, his father, Mr. Dainard (perhaps event the monster) have, through the action of the movie, found a way to let go of whatever emotions they've hidden.

Many narratives (films, novels, TV episodes, etc.) have their own lockets -- objects that suggest more than what they are and often, holding the big abstract idea of the story. Woody Allen has his Paris, Stieg Larsson has his dragon tattoo and Super 8 has its locket.

What a Painter Can Do

The English artist Lucian Freud died Wednesday, July 20th, at age 88.

The man -- grandson of Sigmund -- may not have had the name recognition as a Rembrandt, a Gauguin or a Warhol but he was a prolific portraitist who created dynamic often strange paintings of an entire range of bodies and faces. I was immediately smitten with his stuff when I went to see a London retrospective of his work in 2003. And a copy of his REFLECTION WITH TWO CHILDREN hangs in my classroom at school. Or used to hang -- recently, my co-teacher told me the painting intimidating students so it's now in my office.

It's a self-portrait with images of his son and daughter in the lower left corner. He painted it by looking at his reflection in a mirror on the ground. Every year, I use the painting in my creative writing class to ask students what makes a narrative. The assignment: create a first line of a story based on the painting. The kids love the exercise and their responses have been fantastic.

A few examples:

They had no idea what their father would say when he came home to find the dead dog.
The appointment was at 3.
When he showed up in formal wear, they knew they were in a heap of trouble.

The point of the exercise is to challenge students to see a story in everything -- painting, photograph, sculpture, poem, a song, etc. If it suggest conflict, it's a story. Each of the first lines above, and most of the sentences provoked by the exercise, immediately create tension. And it's conflict and tension that set a narrative in motion

Yes, sometimes your imagination must collaborate with the painter in order to get the story started but interpretation (of any given narrative) always requires a creative kick-start.

Certainly there's a story in Géricault's RAFT OF THE MEDUSA.

But is there one here, in Grant Wood's AMERICAN GOTHIC?

There's tension here. What is the woman looking at? Why isn't she, like her husband, looking forward? And look closely at the man. He's also looking to the side. What's going on outside the frame of the painting? And if there's tension, there's story. Yes, we must assume, but I think the mere presence of questions provides the start of a narrative.

That's one of the wonderful things about stories -- they're everywhere.

Why Three is a Magic Number

Consider this:

Olga, Marina, Irina (Chekov's Three Sisters)

Goneril, Regan, Cordelia (Shakespeare's King Lear)

Athropos, Lachesis, Clotho (the Three Fates of Greek Mythology)

Anastasia, Drizzella, Cinderella (French folk tale by way of Disney)

Elinor, Marianne, Margaret (Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility)

Scarlett, Suellen, Carreen (Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind)

Rachel, Leah, Addy (Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible)

Barbara, Ivy, Karen (Tracy Letts's August: Osage County)

See a pattern?

While reading Eleanor Brown's new novel, The Weird Sisters, which features its own trio of sisters, I thought about how often triad of sisters pop up in literature. The title of Brown's book is reference, in and of itself, to the three witches that haunt Shakespeare's MacBeth.

The narrative here follows the three daughters of a Shakespeare professor who's named them after three of the Bard's famous female characters. Rosalind from As You Like It, Bianca from The Taming of the Shrew and Cordelia (from King Lear). The author makes a clever connection between the personality of the girls and the qualities of the literary characters. Brown has several compelling things to say about family and the restrictive roles siblings must play. Birth order dictates behavior as does past behavior and parental expectations. The Andreas sisters are plagued by all these forces and spend the length of the book trying to slip out from under the pressure of family.

Only when a priest from a neighboring church tells Bean (nickname of Bianca) that there's a way out do these girls get smart. Here's what Father Aidan has to say:

We all have stories we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves we are too fat, or too ugly, or too old, or too foolish. We tell ourselves these stories because they allow us to excuse our actions, and they allow us to pass off the responsibility for things we have done—maybe to something within our control, but anything other than the decisions we have made.... Your story, Bean, is the story of your sisters. And it is past time, I think, for you to stop telling that particular story, and tell the story of yourself.... There are times in our lives when we have to realize out past is precisely what it is, and we cannot change it. But we can change the story we tell ourselves about it, and by doing that, we can change the future.

Pretty smart, I guess, but also very convenient. When you need wisdom in your novel, just put in a priest to tell your characters exactly what they need to hear. But, The Weird Sisters entertains with its spunky voice and its quirky details that allow for three richly drawn women. More than anything, though, the book made me think about the odd phenomenon of the three sisters. Back to the point.

Three, of course, is a magic number.

Three represents unity, the harmony of the opposites, wholeness. A shape or form cannot be created without the third side. But considering yin and yang,  a third element represents disruption, which may just connect to conflict, the driving force of every narrative. And what's more, the number three is said to represent creativity, fecundity and fertility—note that a woman's pregnancy is split into trimesters, three segments of three months. So, the number three is tinged with the spirit of femininity.

Thinking about the sisters listed above, and Eleanor Brown's characters, it's clear that each different member of a family triangle possesses different, often conflicting, characteristics. Is this what these authors are up to? Exploring how three different people will react to a central problem, experience or challenge? Revealing three separate methods of solving a fictional dilemma? Do three sisters give a wholeness to the family, a unity, a shape? Is three more interesting than two or four?

Whatever the case, we have them, all these three sisters. And we have them a lot.

Full disclosure: In the book I'm writing (I'm calling it There You Are for the time being), I've also created three sisters: two full sisters and one half-sister named Joan, Phoebe and Kimberly. It just happened, though. I didn't think "Oh, yeah. If you're going to have sisters, you've got to have three." Or "Shakespeare did it, so I'll do it." These three characters just came out from the world of my imagination.

But maybe they did, because three is indeed a magical number, floating around in my creative consciousness as it does for every writer. Wow. Weird.

Postscript: One of the sister teams listed above is actually part of a foursome. But the fourth sister doesn't make it through the first act so I'm kinda still right. Can you pick the offending sisters out of the bunch?

What's Your Accordion?

Back to The Book Thief.

Liesel Meminger, the so-called book thief, discovers that expresses herself the best through reading and writing. As many of her neighbors cower in a bomb shelter waiting out air attacks, Liesel reads from her latest stolen book.

She didn't dare to look up, but she could feel their frightened eyes 

hanging on to her as she hauled the words in and breathed them out. 

A voice played the notes inside her. This, it said, is your accordion.

My accordion is also reading and writing but even more so, it's talking about the stories I read and write, or hear and see on screens both large and small. My friend and mentor Katherine Legan says fine literature teaches us how to live. I go further. Narratives -- on the page or screen -- teach us not only how to live but also to feel, to think, to love.

This project is dedicated to stories and narratives of all kinds. Please join in the conversation and leave your comments about whatever you read on this blog.