I was in store buying a diet coke this evening when David Bowie’s “Young Americans” came on the radio playing in the shop. I called over Dr Speyer, who was studying loaves of bread as if they were neurotic patients in an asylum, to see if he knew it. Of course not, silly question. I told him it contains one of my favourite lyric lines, that I use all the time talking to writers: “Play me one damn song that will make me break down and cry”, i.e. put something emotional in it that moves me enough to care about working on the rest.
Someone once said ”never underestimate the potency of cheap music” and it’s true, pop lyrics sometimes hit the nail on the head, like my favourite Smiths lyric: “it’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind, over and over and over and over”.
What’s this got to do with the Lab? Not much, except that as I watched the presentations today I felt that the next step along the line for so many was to hit that deep emotional chord – “play me one damn song” – that all of the Labbers know is there somewhere in their material. It’s not that all that’s needed is emotion, but it’s the touchstone that they need to feel deeply, deeply, at some point this week so they can remember what that felt like as they toil (and make no mistake they will be toiling because we haven’t really started the hard development yacca yet) over the next two months.
Some of them have hit that emotional chord once or twice already, others have been probing but have not quite hit the seam yet. That’s OK, we will. We don’t look for it in order to indulge ourselves in the feeling, but in order to know that in this material is a story that has the capacity to touch people. That is by no means all that it has to do, but it must be able to do that.
Some of the work the participants showed today moved our guests in a way that their oral presentations didn’t, and that’s OK too. It means that the emotion is in the work, but not yet on the page. Getting it onto the page is a challenge, but not a real problem because a real problem would be no detectable emotion at all.
As Rolf de Heer said today, a script is two things, a blueprint for a film and a document of seduction. In both of those manifestations the generation of emotion is a principal requirement: no-one ever got seduced by logic and order, and film blueprints need to generate feeling in the actors and crew as well as understanding. As Rolf said too, people work better when the script is better because they care more: emotion again, you see.
I suppose that one really important thing that happens when someone tells a story to someone else is that there is a basic transaction, one human communicating with another, an exchange of human warmth, which must include emotion because we are emotional creatures.
In one of the warm-up games we do in the mornings people are asked to hold hands, and someone said to me today how strange it felt to hold hands even with people you know.
How sad a thought that is. My daughter Charlotte, three and a half, can’t really exist for long without putting her hand into someone else’s. As you walk with her, human warmth passes from hand to hand like a wordless story and it isn’t that it makes her happy, it’s that it makes her able to face life at all. We stop holding hands a lot as we grow – except often older people who maybe remember something from long ago – and so maybe the stories we tell are partly a substitute for that simpler transaction that children understand so profoundly, just a way to hold hands without embarassing ourselves.
And Sandy, there is one more thing to come….
