So, what have we learned? What's the lesson for today? For all the never-ending days and restless nights in Oz? That morality is transient? That virtue cannot exist without violence? That to be honest is to be flawed? That the giving and taking of love both debases and elevates us? That God or Allah or Yahweh has answers to questions we dare not even ask? The story is simple. A man lives in prison and dies. How he dies, that's easy. The who and the why is the complex part. The human part. The only part worth knowing. Peace.
These are the final words of the HBO series, Oz. The series finale made me want to go back and watch the whole thing over again.
That morality is transient? That virtue cannot exist without violence? That to be honest is to be flawed? That the giving and taking of love both debases and elevates us?
What enormous questions these are. Universal truths you're being asked to consider, things I don't think I could ever have articulated but now can't stop thinking about.
A lot of people aren't interested in the show because it's too violent or too scary or too tense. I can't express how much you're missing. That one paragraph up there at the top can, though.
The who and the why is the complex part. The human part. The only part worth knowing.
I tend to write short stories, character sketches really, moments. When I was creating theatre pieces, largely without words, I was known for doing something called "deconstructions". Basically you build a whole play off of one moment. So for instance I built a version of Medea that was all about her waiting on the beach for Jason to come back. If you know the story you know that he goes off and marries Creusa in order to get her dad's kingdom so he never does come back and Medea goes off her nut. I wanted to explore the waiting the pining, the part that put her off that proverbial nut. It's exactly what Tom Fontana did with Oz. To take each prisoner, each person defined by their crime, and split them open so you could see all the rings of the tree that spread from that moment.
I'd like to figure out how to do that in as many layers as Fontana does. Wouldn't mind having as insanely stellar a group of artists bring it to fruition, either.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
The lesson for today
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This deconstruction you speak of is at the heart of how I try to teach writing. Don't tell me about the family dinner - tell me about the fact that dad never looks up from his plate the entire time. Show me a tiny piece of what we're looking at and let me work out how it's representative of the whole.
ReplyDeleteThere's a quote (which I can't attribute - I'm sorry) about writing that says something like "don't write about the war; write about the child's abandoned shoe by the side of the road."
That's where the gold is.
It's important to keep in mind that, while we may be writing about the abandoned shoe, we're still trying to tell the story of the war. Writers often lose track of the bigger purpose, focusing on the minutiae and leaving out the connection to anything more panoptic.
ReplyDeleteAll stories need a strong foundation of characters, plot and imagery. Deconstructive writing gives characters identity, puts plot into context and provides imagery with the meaning necessary to make smart writing come together efficiently. It adds wonderful flavor to the essential ingredients of a story but, if those essentials are missing or weak, the story will be no further ahead for its use.