At work we often think about stories inheriting from other stories. Usually this is with prototype stories, like genres. For example, in the date movie genre, there is a boy and a girl. They meet, break up over a misunderstanding (usually one character is pretending to be something they’re not), and then get back together at the end with a public declaration of love. Any specific date movie will inherit from that prototype story. That is, take it as a skeleton and elaborate on it or perhaps give a variation or twist on it.

Some movies’ stories inherit from real life, so-called “based on a true story” movies. But a really interesting thing is when a real life story inherits from a movie’s story. This falls under the general category of “life imitating art”, but I’m specifically thinking of a more direct inheritance, when the situation surrounding the making of a movie inherits from the movie’s story.

Werner Herzog plays with this in almost every movie he makes, and it is absolutely essential to the effects he achieves. For example, in Fitzcarraldo, the main character in the story convinces a tribe of South American natives to help him move a steamboat over a mountain using a system of pulleys (to gain access to a river on the other side). He does this by showing off Western art and technology (opera played on a phonograph), convincing the natives he is a god of sorts.

Herzog uses shots that show that this feat was not done with special effects (like miniature replicas) and that the natives are not played by actors. So you know that in real life, Herzog actually convinced a tribe of South American natives to actually move the steamboat over the mountain, which is really what makes the movie so incredible.

Rescue Dawn has a great chain of inheritance. Dieter Dengler was a person in real life who was captured as a POW in the Vietnam War. In 1997, Herzog made a documentary about Dieter’s experiences called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This movie inherits from a real life story (and if you’ve seen a Herzog documentary, you know that “inherits” is a good word here). Herzog then remade this story into a hollywood war movie, Rescue Dawn. So Rescue Dawn’s story inherits from Little Dieter Needs to Fly’s story which inherits from a real life story.

But in a recent special on Herzog, it was mentioned that Rescue Dawn is perhaps closer to reality than Little Dieter Needs to Fly, because it documents the real experiences of Christian Bale (who plays the role of Dieter in Rescue Dawn). We see Bale actually walking through the Vietnam jungle barefoot, actually getting really skinny, actually picking up a live snake out of a river, actually biting the snake and tearing its skin off (well, there’s a cut here, so it’s probably a fake/dead snake, but the snake in the river is definitely real).

Real life inheriting from Rescue Dawn inheriting from Little Dieter Needs to Fly inheriting from Real Life.

I just finished watching Flirting with Disaster, an early movie by David O. Russell, director/writer of I <3 Huckabees. Due to certain ideas we’ve been kicking around at work, I’m currently quite locked in to a specific way of looking at the world, which got me thinking about the story structures used to build this movie and how they are exploited to create and release tension.

Spoilers herein.

Here is an excellent example of a story being driven by its own restructuring.

It specifically draws attention to how people build a certain worldview, then try to fit new facts into this worldview until there are too many contradictions and the worldview has to be restructured.

There is even a character, herself a filmmaker, who is a student of this phenomenon. She arranges meetings between adopted children, now grown, and the parents they’ve never met, to see how this new piece of information (meeting their parents) affects the child’s worldview.

The paradigm for this restructuring theme is the “bumping” incident. The husband and filmmaker integrate the dad’s story about “bumping” into their worldview. Then when they are approached by a van on the highway, they try to fit this fact into their worldview, thinking the van is trying to rob them. When the contradiction arises that the van is not trying to rob them, they restructure their worldview to say that the dad is neurotic and his story was exaggerated or highly unlikely. The filmmaker character explicitly gives this explanation after the incident.

This worked well for me, because at this point in the movie, I was building a worldview where in this movie, being of the Ben Stiller romantic comedy genre, the things that can go wrong will go wrong, often in a situationally ironic way. So with the dad’s neurotic story, I thought that for sure this ridiculous scenario would actually happen to them. So then the “twist”, this restructuring, happened to my worldview at the same time as it happened to the husband and filmmaker characters.

The restructuring theme is used throughout the story at different scales. On two occasions, Ben Stiller’s character meets a person he presumes is his parent, and “fishes” for facts that reinforce this worldview (”we have the same forehead!”). Tension builds as contradictions between the actual situation and the expected parent-child situation arise. The tension releases when Ben’s (and our) worldview is restructured to say that the person is not Ben’s parent.

We also have the affair situations that set up tension. This tension is between the two possible worlds: one where the spouse is being faithful and the other where the spouse is having an affair. The movie sets up two affairs, complimentarily between the husband and wife. These tension threads span the entire movie and are exploited for all the strongest jokes. Specifically I’m thinking of the tension created around Ben breaking the glass display case, and him having to explain, that is, fit this fact into the worldview he projects to his wife, where his relationship with the other woman is innocent.

The huge tension release comes when Ben bursts into the room his wife is in. He sees her intimately involved with the other man, but is not surprised, showing that he has already integrated this information into his worldview. The next lines he exchanges with his wife reveal that he knows that she knows he’s been flirting with the other woman. Indeed all of the “he knows she knows” layers have collapsed. He and his wife share the same worldview. Trust. The big release.

In the same sweep, it is revealed through the mishaps each spouse has in his/her affair, that the two are really “meant for each other” (in the way prescribed by the date genre).

Momus is one of my favorite songwriters. (He’s also a favorite of Belle & Sebastian, Of Montreal, and Vampire Weekend). I got into Momus through his connections with Cornelius and Kahimi Karie. He had a couple top tens in Japan with the songs he wrote for K.

Last night I saw Momus, accompanied by ipod, chronologically karaoke through a career-spanning retrospective. I knew about half the songs. All of the backing arrangements were completely fresh to me though.

Throughout the performance, Aki Sasamoto did interpretive dance dressed as a Kubuki stagehand. Aki is an amazing, intuitive dancer! I especially liked when she started taking all the spare mic stands in back and ceremoniously adjusting and arranging them on stage. She and Momus have a great dynamic together, playing with the fact that you know they’re making it up as they go long. They are fresh out of a long-running improvisational performance piece in New York.

I think what makes Momus special is that he can sustain an idea (usually a language-formal idea or literary-cultural comment) for several verses while consistently keeping the language pushed to its limit, never wasting a word. His melodies and arrangements always support the lyrics absolutely (he’s strongly words first, music second). And his choruses never disappoint (a problem with many other talented songwriters).

It always amazes me to see an artist present a singular concept while pulling all the stops constantly, effortlessly. Roman Polanski does this for me too. His movies are full of cinematic memes, like the creepy guy hiding in a private space glimpsed in a mirror and then he’s not there, the voyeuristic neighbor in the background who watches the main action until he’s spotted, or the camera following a character through a busy street with jazz in the soundtrack (all examples from Repulsion). But these effects are always done in service of the story, never for their own sake.

All too often in my own creative endeavors, I think of an effect and build a piece around that, whereas I should start with a concept and use effects to enable the concept to be born. I suppose the key is to internalize a repertoire through practice and experience, to make it intuitive.

I was really surprised by this movie. The whole thing is told by an internet forum. The world as experienced by the ether, which is a dream of the title character.

Debussy and Satie are used extensively. They do some cool things with the exposure; I think it would a good one to watch while tripping, if anybody still does that. There is a fantastic home movie in the middle with a best guy, caught on characters’ cameras (ether).

David Lynch doesn’t usually say interesting things (though I love his movies) and this guy, Mark Cousins, doesn’t normally give good interviews (though I love that they exist). But this one (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) actually worked out really well.

There’s a gem at the very beginning of Part 3 when Lynch tells of how the character of Bob evolved in Fire Walk With Me.

Also, one minute in to Part 4, he describes not only his philosophy of moving the eye in his paintings and films (using textures as rhythms), but also tells his “Eye of the Duck” story. The idea is that a duck makes a good subject for a painting because of its textures and more importantly the relative amounts of the textures and their spatial relationships. The bill and legs, with their thinness, color, and line-ness move “fast” (not sure whether this refers to how the eye physically moves or perhaps the way the neurons fire in response to the visual stimulation but I think I know what he means–he says fire and electricity are the fastest). The feathers on the main body, with their blob shape and amorphous texture move slow. But the key, the “jewel”, is the eye (it is the “fastest” part of the image). And it is perfectly placed on the duck. If it were placed on the bill or feet it would be overwhelmed by their fastness. If it were placed on the body it would get lost. It’s placement with respect to the bill and the S-shaped neck connected to the body is just right.

Lynch claims that he tries to put in an “eye of the duck” scene in each of his movies. This is a scene that isn’t necessarily essential to the plot, but is absolutely essential to the artistic effect of the movie.

If you search through interviews, you can find Lynch mentioning which scene is the eye of the duck scene in his various movies (his answers sometimes conflict). Fans sometimes speculate on which scene they think is the one.

So I will do that here, speculating on the Lynch movies that are relatively fresh in my memory:

Mulholland Drive
The cowboy

Lost Highway
The phone at the party

Blue Velvet
“In Dreams” at Ben’s house