Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Bulkington (A) on April 19, 2004 at 09:42:46

In Reply to: Interview with Arriaga. posted by dennzio on April 19, 2004 at 08:47:23:

21 Grams refers to the weight a person loses at the exact moment of death. I can't say this is a corroborated specific fact. Some doctors have weighed dying people, and at the exact moment of death they lose 21 grams. I wanted to use this as a metaphor about the way a person who dies weighs over the ones that survive them. Sometimes you carry this weight all of your life.

That's fine but also rather obvious. Narration in film is a pet-peeve of mine. Being a visual/dramatic medium, I want my films to show rather than tell (there are exceptions, however, Barry Lyndon being one; having recently watched it again, I'm still on the fence with Badlands), and since the cast of 21 Grams demonstrates "the way a person who dies weighs over the ones that survive them" the attempt, via narration, to offer up an explanatory metaphor is pure redundancy to me and tends, as narration often does, to reduce the natural enigmaticness of human relationships to some kind of moralizing thesis statement.

As for the non-linear structure:

This was a choice I took for this story in particular. I always want to find the way a story has to be told. I wasn't intending to write this structure, until I read an old, unfinished novel I wrote when I was 24 or 25 years old. It went back and forth all the time. And I have a short story that has been recently published that also goes back and forth all the time. I think this is the way we tell stories on a daily basis -- we never go linear. We always go back and forth from one point to the other. For example, if I want to tell you how I met my wife, I will never begin at the very beginning…I think this is the natural way to tell stories.

Now this is very interesting, and could well be the basis for a film about the telling of a story. It would also be appropriate to a film whose characters were pre-occupied with the past, and 21 Grams is certainly a fit. But I think its frgmentation was indiscriminate in this regard.

My worry was to have emotional continuum. There are huge gaps of narrative information, but I want to have an emotional continuum. I was trying to balance every scene very carefully, and make them contradictory.

Interesting point as well. I'll watch for this when I watch it again, but I'm not sure it would have lost its emotional continuity or the balancing of contradictory scenes were it presented in linear fashion: Penn's suffering and waiting and Watts' domestic bliss standing on either side of Del Toro's struggle to recover from his past (which is how we follow the narrative from the start anyway, but the fragmentation mixes it up with foreglimpses that, again, I'm not sure were necessary). And then tragedy strikes and the initial relationship changes. Etc.

And then I was obsessed with light. Few people notice this, but in the screenplay I tried to have the first 30 pages have a lot of light, day scenes. When the accident is revealed, I want to have dark scenes -- then there are afternoon, dusk, or dawn scenes, where everything is between light and dark, so you can feel how the characters are feeling at that moment. I was also trying to achieve that, so that's why I chose this structure -- to emotionally involve the audience, to mold it narratively, to look for a dialogue with the audience. I always care that the audience has a dialogue with the film.

This is interesting, too, but I'm not sure it bears out. If light and darkness are in sympathy with what's going on on screen, then the film beginning with light ("the first 30 pages"), followed by darkness when the accident occurrs, is contradicted by the natural emotional continuum of the linear narrative as well as by his justification for fragmentation above. All is not rosy in the beginning; all is not dark after. I'm dubious. But I'll watch for it next time around.