Ron Pisaturo’s Blog

My Favorite Movies

I love movies in the Romantic tradition of heroic characters engaged in the ingenious and passionate pursuit of important values. I love what Ayn Rand calls the “benevolent universe.” [—Added 5/2/10.] These are movies that I look forward to seeing again and again.

There are many movies I have not yet seen, so I may add to this list from time to time.

An Affair to Remember (1957)
Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, The (1947)
Ball of Fire (1941)
Battling Butler (1926)
Black Stallion, The (1979)
Cameraman, The (1928)
Christmas in July (1940)
Cluny Brown (1946)
College (1927)
Cover Girl (1994)
Cyrano de Bergerac (1950)
Day Will Dawn, The (aka The Avengers) (1942).
Dodsworth (1936)
Easter Parade (1948)
Escape (1940)
For Me and My Gal (1942)
Fountainhead, The (1949)
Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)
Houseboat (1958)
In the Good Old Sumertime (1949)
It Happened One Night (1934)
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
Lady in Question, The (1940)
Libeled Lady (1936)
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (1943)
Lili (1953)
Love Letters (1945)
Madame Curie (1943)
Major and the Minor, The (1942)
Middle of the Night (1959)
Miracle Worker, The (1962)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
National Velvet (1944)
Navigator, The (1924)
Notorious (1946)
Now Voyager (1942)
On the Waterfront (1954) (added 5/16/10)
Palm Beach Story, The (1942)
Pride and Prejudice (1940)
Random Harvest (1942)
Sabrina (1954)
Scarlet Pimpernel, The (1934)
Shane (1953)
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
So Proudly We Hail! (1943)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Sound of Music, The (1965)
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)
Summer Stock (1950)
Sunrise (1927)
Swing Time (1936)
This Land is Mine (1943)
To Be Or Not To Be (1942)
Top Hat (1935)
Vacation from Marriage (aka Perfect Strangers) (1945)
We the Living (1986, edited from movies from 1942)
Wizard of Oz, The (1939)
Women, The (1939)

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I Missed Ayn Rand’s Birthday

Ayn Rand’s 105th birthday was on February 2. On that day, I was immersed in unimportant details of my life. But this morning I celebrated Ayn Rand’s birthday in my favorite way. I opened up one of her novels (The Fountainhead this time) at random places and began reading.

Perhaps I should perform this celebration every day. After all, I look at beautiful paintings every day. The novels of Ayn Rand (especially The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) are the most beautiful and inspiring works of art that I have ever encountered. Why not enjoy them every day?

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Whether to Keep Secrets from the Reader/Audience in Fiction

Myrhaf, who also write for The New Clarion, has an excellent post on whether to keep secrets from the reader/audience in writing fiction. In one of my plays, I made an editing change similar to the one that Myrhaf describes, but I had not conceptualized the issue so deeply.

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Recommendation: Crosspoints

It is rare for me to find a book, aside from the works of Ayn Rand, that I love reading. A great classic, such as Shakespeare play, can move me by certain elements of it and make me marvel at its greatness; but the dark or mixed sense of life of so many classics can drag me down in the end.

I loved reading the novel Crosspoints, by Alexandra York. Many parts were moving to me. The heroes are noble, like the Greek statues that the archeologist heroine searches for on ocean floors. They pursue their happiness with passion, courage, style, and remarkable wisdom about life, love, and art. And their pursuits are described with realistic, evocative detail that makes me understand why they love what they are doing. I love it too, and wonder whether I would have the courage to do what they do.

I realize that I’m not doing as I say: I am not giving details. I am afraid to give anything away in an order other than what the author intended. The book is very exciting from the first page. I read the novel several years ago, but when I recently recalled the ending of the first chapter, I got goose bumps again.

If you want to know specifics about the characters and plotline, see the summary on the book jacket. Better yet, my suggestion to the author is to make the first chapter available online. But my advice has not been needed in order for the book to sell; a Russian translation is already on the market, and a Spanish translation is on the way. For more information about the novel and other works by Alexandra York, go here.

One of my least favorite things about the novel is the title, which is a little on the nose for me. But the fact that the novel really is about ‘crosspoints’ is ultimately the most important virtue of the novel. Apropos of my recent discussions about dramatic conflict (here and here), each character faces a dramatic internal conflict and a ‘crosspoint’: a moment when the internal conflict comes to a head, and the character must make a conscious choice. The choice that each character makes shapes that character’s world. And that is why the sense of life of this novel is bright, not dark: not because life is always happy, but because one can make it so.

The author, Alexandra York, is the founder of American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART), a “nonprofit educational foundation dedicated to a rebirth of beauty and life-affirming values in all of the fine arts.” I have seen some of Ms. York’s personal collection of art, and I can tell you that she knows beauty.

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Dramatic Conflict, Part 2

Thank you, Ryan, Rogan, and IMH for your excellent answers to the question I posed at the end of my previous post, Dramatic Conflict. I had not thought of the points you make. (Thanks also to David for your thanks.)

With revenge and altruism as the only values (if any) that today’s heroes fight for, no wonder they are so grim. And no wonder the expression of any other values seems so unmotivated, like lip service. When the hero in Braveheart started speaking for freedom, I remember having asked myself, “Where did that come from?”

Perhaps an even starker illustration of the points you all make is in the movie The Patriot (2000). In this film, the hero (played by Mel Gibson, for whom revenge seems to be a recurring theme) does not join the American Revolution until his son is killed by the British. The idea of reducing America’s fight for independence to a fight for revenge is particularly appalling. Can anyone name an American Founding Father who joined the Revolution only after a loved one was killed by the British?

Thankfully, heroes in some films do sometimes seek selfish values, at least in the realm of love. But fighting a war and killing for selfish values—or for any values—does seem forbidden. It seems that writers feel the need to give their heroes an excuse—in place of a valid reason—for killing an enemy. And an excuse is a feeling, an urge, a neurosis or psychosis, something the hero has no control over—as opposed to an idea, which is chosen.

This mindset is consistent with Naturalism as opposed to Romanticism, as defined by Ayn Rand. For those unfamiliar with her esthetics, see Ayn Rand’s essay “What is Romanticism” in The Romantic Manifesto; the essay begins as follows:

Romanticism is a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition.

For a Romantic hero, an internal conflict (traditionally called ‘Man vs. Himself’) would be a conflict of values, such as love vs. honor, or freedom vs. peace; and the hero must choose between them.

Naturalism, on the other hand, denies free will. For a Naturalist character, an internal conflict would be a conflict of emotions, urges, or psychological problems, such as rage vs. despair, or lust vs. guilt; such a character never makes a choice, instead merely wallowing in his torment and oscillating between satisfying one urge and then the other in response to external stimuli.

(For a good exploration of Ayn Rand’s distinction between Romanticism and Naturalism in characterization, see “Consciousness vs. Subconscious Motivation in Literature”, by Tore Boeckmann in The Intellectual Activist, July 1993 and September 1993.)

By far the most famous teacher of screenwriting today is Robert McKee. From my reading, he is also by far the best ‘mainstream’ writer on screenwriting. (Of course, I am not including Ayn Rand in the mainstream.) I looked up ‘conflict’ in McKee’s famous book on screenwriting, Story. Here is part of what I found.

In praising the creation of “inner conflict” in the film Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), McKee writes (p.215):

In the film’s first moments Kramer discovers his wife has left him and his son. He’s torn with an inner conflict that takes the form of doubts and fears that he’s in over his head vs. a male arrogance telling him whatever women do is easy.

Whether the scene from Kramer vs. Kramer is actually as weak as McKee’s praise implies, I don’t recall. My point here is that an entire generation of screenwriters is being mis-taught on the nature of internal conflict.

(McKee also analyzes the conflict in a scene from Casablanca (1942). Perhaps in a future post, I can discuss that.)

It is too bad that more screenwriters are not studying Ayn Rand (for example, The Art of Fiction) instead of McKee.

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Dramatic Conflict

This post is about art, but I will start by quoting something I wrote a few weeks ago in a political context:

Even a rat fights when cornered. But a man of reason and courage does not wait until his loved ones have been murdered and his own survival hangs by a thread. He fights well before it is almost too late.

In contemporary movies, it is common for the hero to be so reluctant that he does not start to fight until it is actually too late.

Consider the hit movie Braveheart (1995). At the beginning of the movie, friends of the hero are married, but the bride is carried off and raped by an English nobleman under the King’s decree of primae noctis (first night). The hero does nothing. He eventually marries in secret to avoid primae noctis, but one day his wife is attacked by soldiers. Only then does the hero fight, but it is too late; his wife is killed.

A better hero would have fought sooner. He would have understood the principle: If his friend’s wife could be raped legally, so could his own wife; more generally, he and his own future wife had no rights. A better hero would, from the moment the other bride was raped, have begun planning to fight. He would have had the courage to begin his fight at the time of his own choosing, at the time most advantageous for his own victory. Instead, this hero chose to plan nothing; he chose instead to have a few extra months of peace. The result was that when his own wife was attacked, he was unprepared to defend her, and she was murdered.

Some might say that the writer of Braveheart made the story go this way for the purpose of having more drama: the hero’s loss of his wife puts the hero in the lowest possible situation from which he must rise; the loss burdens the hero with the greatest hardship that he must overcome. This setup for the story, many contemporary writers would say, gives the story greater conflict.

The exact opposite is true. With his beloved wife already dead, with his highest value already gone, the hero has far less to live for. Indeed, for most of the remainder of the story, the hero acts like someone already half dead. He is a soldier fighting until the day he dies to join his wife. Risking his life is therefore not much of a risk; his choice to fight is not much of a choice. Therefore, the conflict is greatly diminished.

It is a curious fact that so many contemporary screenplays exemplify this incorrect view of dramatic conflict. In the hit movie Gladiator (2000), the hero’s wife and child are murdered early in the movie. The effect is the same as in Braveheart, only more so: the hero seems hardly to care to live anymore; he kills people, including bad guys, merely while waiting to join his dead family.

In contrast, the heroes of Ayn Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would be quite well off—by the standards of most—without having to struggle at all. But they aspire to lives much more exalted than would be possible under the status quo. For these heroes, the conflict is great, because they have a great deal of “skin in the game”; they must constantly choose to stake all they have or could have—a highly successful career (by the standards of most), a wife and family, a life of comfort—for their higher goal. These heroes don’t have hardship thrust upon them; they constantly face the difficult choice to undergo hardship in order to achieve their goal.

Now that’s conflict.

America’s Founding Fathers are great real-life models for dramatic heroes. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Paul Revere—these men were successful in their careers and lived in relative material comfort for their time. But they risked all of that—“we mutually pledge our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—for an idea.

Again, that’s conflict.

Both Braveheart and Gladiator could have been exceptionally good movies if not for an erroneous notion of what makes dramatic conflict. This notion seems prevalent among today’s screenwriters (present writer excluded). Why?

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Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday

Since my favorite Shakespeare sonnet (#29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) is so well known, here instead is my second favorite (#76):

Why is my verse so barren of new pride
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday.

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Laughter, Weeping, and Crying – Update

My March 4th post on Laughter, Weeping, and Crying was a revision of something I wrote in 1999. At that time, I had done some library research on the topic, but had not found any source of much use. But last week, thanks to the Internet and Google, I did find an excellent source: The Emotions, by Nico H. Frijda (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

I don’t even have the book yet; it is checked out at the university library I use. But Google Book Search has a preview of the book online. Pages 51-55 include, among other thoughts, explanations similar to mine regarding laughter, weeping and crying.

Now that I know where in the library to look, perhaps I can find additional sources on this topic by browsing the stacks. How did I miss what seems an obvious place to look (books on the emotions)? I was looking for works specifically on laughter, weeping, or crying. (Sighing.)

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Laughter, Weeping, and Crying

This post may be of interest particularly to my friends in the dramatic arts, but who’s not interested in drama?

Observe that people rarely cry or weep in the heat of battle. It just would not have been practical for the mind and body to have been designed that way. If a warrior sees his comrade slain alongside him, he cannot very well continue to fight if his body convulses in sobs and his eyes water. But after the battle, he will weep for joy at the victory he had feared he might not attain, and he will weep for the loss of his comrade who did not live to see it, and he will laugh at the smallness of his enemy compared to himself.

Here’s another example: A mother discovering her child injured may shriek and scream, but rarely will she shed tears; rather, she will rush into action. Only after handing off the child to a doctor, for instance, when there is nothing left for her to do, will she break down in sobs— whether or not the child is all right.

In my judgment from personal experience, the actions of laughing, weeping, and crying are discharges of energy that had been summoned for action (physical and/or mental); the energy is discharged once it is realized that there is no action to take.

If laughter were put into words, they would be: “I must deal with this” followed by “All that for that? Ha, ha.” Or: “Much ado about nothing.”

If weeping were put into words, they would be: “I fear for that which I value, and I must do something” followed by “But there is nothing to be done.” Or: “Much ado, but nothing to do.” Weeping is a call to arms followed by the realization that the battle is over, that the value is already won or lost. If the value is lost, the tears will be sad. But if the value is won, the tears will be joyful. Often, since even successful battles often have casualties, there will be a mixture of joy and sadness.

A combination of laughter and tears says: “Much ado about nothing, but I had truly feared it was something.” Consider this example: A missing child is found playing in his tree house.

Weeping is not necessarily sad, as laughter is not necessarily joyful.

Consider a mother at her daughter’s wedding. For twenty years or more, in every crisis, the mother has protected this child. When the child was sick, the mother worried. Now, at this milestone event of marriage, it is natural for the mother to have fleeting memories of the child’s life, including times she worried for the child, and to feel the worry again. And then she realizes: no worry or help is necessary. The mother has succeeded in her twenty-year quest. And then the energy that the worry had summoned can be channeled to other emotions—so that she can enjoy fully the achievement of her dear value: the welfare of her child. Thus, she weeps the tears of joy.

In my experience, tears of joy are an exquisitely pleasurable physical sensation; spiritually, they are a means of experiencing the achievement of values—of experiencing the determination to achieve them in the face of danger and uncertainty, combined with the serenity of knowing that the values have been achieved.

Not let us compare weeping with crying. Weeping is the shedding of tears. Crying is weeping plus the letting out of voiced sound—a cry. At weddings, there is often weeping but seldom crying, unless there is a jilted lover present.

While weeping requires two conditions—the summoning of energy for action and the realization that no action is possible—crying requires a third condition: denial. The cry, the voiced sound, is a cry of “No!”

(I’ve heard it said that Ayn Rand thought that crying contains a “No,” a protest. But I cannot cite a source for that attribution, and I don’t know whether she said more on the subject.)

If crying were put into words, they would be: “I fear for that which I value, and I must do something. But there is nothing to be done. No! But yes.”

In other words, denial alone will not make one cry. In order for crying to occur, the denial must not be working so well. The denial must be there (along with the energy that the denial requires), but so must be the acknowledgment of the loss. Both of these conflicting elements must exist together.

Thus laughing, weeping, and crying all require a combination of conflicting elements. Simply being happy will not make one laugh, and simply being unhappy will not make one weep or cry.

As dramatic artists know, an actor’s laughing, weeping, or crying is not necessarily the best way to make others laugh, weep, or cry, and is certainly not the only way. For example, a hero coming to the rescue may make other characters and the audience weep for joy. The hero is not weeping, because he needs his energy for rescuing. The others weep because the energy they were using for fighting is no longer needed; the hero is fighting for them.

I would be happy to hear whether your own experiences support or do not support my thinking on this subject, and I welcome your own thoughts on the matter.

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Recommendation: Art Renewal Center

I would like to recommend a Web site that has given me many hours of pleasure and inspiration: the Art Renewal Center, at http://www.artrenewal.org/. The site contains “one of the largest on-line museums on the internet … that features tens of thousands of high quality images of the greatest painters and sculptors in human history.” And the site’s creators—led by Fred Ross, Chairman of ARC—know great art. Moreover, they are tireless champions of a renaissance of representational, romantic painting and sculpture in contemporary society.

I have downloaded more than 300 images from the site, and I use a slide show of them as my screen saver. Since doing so, I have marveled at how much more color I notice in the world.

For those with larger budgets than mine, the site also sells high-quality prints. And there is also a great deal of information about art and artists for the serious student of fine art.

These are some of my favorite artists on the site:

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Edmund Blair Leighton
William Bouguereau
Alexandre Cabanel
Caravaggio
Frank Dicksee
John William Godward
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Lord Frederick Leighton
John Everett Millais
Raphael
Rembrandt
James Jacques Joseph Tissot
Vermeer
John William Waterhouse
George Frederick Watts
William Clarke Wontner

And there are hundreds more.

Also, here is a great source for high-resolution images of paintings by Vermeer: http://www.essentialvermeer.com/ .

Enjoy!

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