Année : 2004

Interesting article in The Village Voice (found via Way Down Here) about the fact that true creativity is more present in television than in movies these days.

In the past year, I had meetings with two different directors about the feature film screenplay I’m working on. Both directors are recognized names in Quebec’s cinema. When we talked about scripts we like and what’s interesting these days, the directors mentioned The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. They didn’t think to mention movie scripts! And it used to be that people were ashamed to say they worked in television!

The problem is, tv writers get to develop characters over the course of hours and seasons. When you write for a movie, you have 120 minutes at the most to make sure that moviegoers will get a clear sense of the main characters and get attached to them. So when a movie director tells me to write characters like in The Sopranos, when I know he’s watched 6 seasons of the show, I cringe a little…

I’ve always been attracted to television writing because of that possibility to develop characters over time. For me, the positive aspect of this « quality trend » in television is what the reporter of The Village Voice considered a downside:

« TV is altogether less oriented around one artist’s singular vision and drive. For a start, it’s not the director who’s king, it’s the writer. Arteta argues that’s why the quality of TV « has shot through the roof now. In television the writers make a lot of money and have all the creative power, so the talent gravitates there. You get these amazing writers running TV shows. » Producers also expect guest directors to step on to the set for an episode, make their contribution and leave – almost like an anonymous gun for hire. »

Hey, what’s not to like about this situation?

Lady Snowblood: What would Quentin have done without her?

« Our psychic life and loves oscillate back and forth between aloneness and connection. Both can be frightening: both are risky. The dangers inherent in each can be circumvented through contrivance and fantasy. Thus the unconscious contract that parallels many legal marriage contracts is an agreement to pretend to be permanently, unalterably, impossibly bound – an agreement that creates the necessity for a carefully guarded, perpetually measured distance.

Jacques Lacan, the influential French psychoanalyst, seems never to have grasped the possibility of a genuine relatedness, but he captured vividly the mirages of degraded romance in the service of illusory security: « Love, » he noted, « is giving something you don’t have to someone you don’t know. »

Excerpt from Can Love Last? by Stephen A. Mitchell.

Salon Magazine wrote a great review of this book which made me buy it, a couple of years ago. I still haven’t managed to finish it…

« Stephen Mitchell’s own view, both warmed and deepened by a 30-year clinical practice of what came to be called « relational psychoanalysis, » is that romantic love doesn’t die a natural, inevitable death: We kill it, out of fear. It’s just too dangerous, he says, to experience erotic currents toward somebody you actually know, somebody who shares not only your bed but the chores and the cable bill. What if he or she stopped desiring you? Compared to the emotional risks of long-term domestic passion, Mitchell observes, the zipless fuck is as daring as oatmeal. »