Friday, June 8, 2007
Hot or Cold?
Posted by Zach in News

I don’t think it’s too bold to assert that every one has two emotional categories. Imagine having two emotional buckets. One labeled hot and the other labeled cold. Don’t you think you could pretty much go through every expression of culture and find that it inclines itself toward a particular bucket? For instance: One could go through one’s music collection. Bach goes in the cold bucket. Arvo Part: Cold. Steve Reich: Cold. Philip Glass: Cold. Credence Clearwater: Hot. Beethoven: Hot. Sufjan Stevens: Cold. Vivaldi: Cold. Stravinski: Hot. Kenny Rogers: Hot. Bob Dylan Hot…You get the idea (just for the record I don’t have any Kenny Rogers to speak of). I think that with Literature one might be equally able to divvy things up. Hamlet: Cold. King Lear: Cold. As You Like It: Hot. Treasure Island: Hot. Frankenstein: Hot. This Side of Paradise: Hot. Sweet Valley High: Very Hot (that last one’s a joke). Okay, I’ve spent too much on this, but I think my point is relatively clear. I should further note that though there exist a subjective element, there is surprising consensus on what is cold or hot.

I guess that was my very long introduction to say that I’m currently moving from a preoccupation with the cold bucket to the hot bucket. The concept of people speaking tales strikes me as something for the hot bucket. I’m referring just to the idea of oral transmission. I think this makes me enjoy voice over, storytelling festivals, and radio plays. I like the simulated personability (word?) of it. Now, I know that when you write, it’s best to show and not tell, but I think that there is a level where people enjoy being told (as it applies specifically to the color of the communication, not a shortcut for exposition) because it seems emotionally warmer than just being shown.

Michael Sack, quoted in Michael Horton’s book A Better Way, considers the idea of technology vs. the personal as it relates to church. And he rejects the concept that young people need media the way German people require beer.

“For X-ers, the media are flashing two thousand images a day. They can’t deal with that, so they ignore the images. As a result, young people are a hundred times more sophisticated in handling images, but not in attributing significance to them. The young eat images like popcorn; older adults eat them like a meal…When pastors…ask people to watch a video, they need to know it will be less effective for those who are young. The impact of anything that hasn’t been personally delivered is going to go down by about 25 percent for each ten years an audience is below 50.”

Might this mean that if one has to deal in media for a non-baby-boomer-generation, that it is perhaps appealing to have the tale mediated through a personality rather than an extrinsic authorial force?

Screenwriting guru Robert McKee hates voice over that isn’t used as counterpoint. In his famous book Story he writes, “Do not put them on your knee as if they were children and ‘explain’ life, for the misuse and overuse of narration is not only slack, it’s patronizing. And if the trend toward it continues, cinema will degrade into adulterated novels and our art will shrivel.”

Pretty dramatic, right? But come on. How cool is it when Morgan Freeman talks to you like you’re his buddy? Anyway, for the next few days I’m going to dig into the hot bucket and serialize an extremely short radio play. It couldn’t be a screenplay because it has enough narration to make the cinema shrivel up like a raisin. Anyway, see if the narration helps or hurts. I’ll post the first installment Monday. Oh, also, just a heads up. It’s a work in progress.

One Response to “Hot or Cold?”

Stephanie comments:
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

The hot/cold dichotomy can be very useful in analyzing the emotional tenor of a piece or even a mode of communication–thanks for the thoughts on that!

I do think, perhaps, you over react to Robert McKee’s sentiments. Keep in mind he is speaking to the “misuse and overuse of narration.” Narration is often the fall-back of lazy writers who are use narration not for it’s relative “hot-ness,” but for the ease of communicating information they are too unskilled to communicate any other way. In such cases, narration is, as McKee said, “slack” and “patronizing” and even “shrivel[ing].”

That said, we as writers should deliberately weigh the emotional temperature of every device we employ. Narration as a “hot bucket” item is something I would like to explore in greater depth.

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