🎧📖▶️ Listen to the audio above, read it as an essay below, or click here (or scroll down) to watch the YouTube video.
The Brew is about what I’m struggling with and getting right as an artist – and sometimes as a human being – in the 21st century. This week, in between working on the 2nd draft of that TV pilot script I was commissioned to write, I’m struggling with the state of how we talk about the arts. Specifically, in the wake of the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, though far from limited to it.
What I mean is: how we talk about it with each other – not arts discourse, which is a more formalized kind of discussion we have as a culture. For example, this newsletter.
So, let’s get into it…
When I lived in Los Angeles, one of my favorite things to do was gather friends at my house to watch films I’d curate for them. Almost as good were the many nights we all spent checking out new releases and classic films on the big screen together.
Afterward, we would rarely all agree if the film or films were great and, more often than not, disagreed. Some of my best friends are idiots, for example.
Just kidding – except about you, Jason. Rogue One is amazing, you’re still ridiculously wrong.
But jokes aside, I’ve certainly gotten worked up enough to demand of these friends, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Especially you, Jason.
We then laughed, hugged, and parted ways knowing we’d do it all over again very soon.
My point is: we’re supposed to disagree with each about art – and not just because any piece of art produced to make everyone happy would surely suck.
No, we’re supposed to make our cases, we’re supposed to debate others’ opinions, and we’re supposed to find fun and even joy in that process. We’re supposed to learn from the process.
Social media has convinced us to treat everything — even movies and TV shows, for example — as tribalistic feuds. We’ve made art and even artists declarations about our identity and even morality, about who we are – leaving out the possibility our opinions will evolve as we grow ourselves.
I find this individually and culturally destructive.
It tells us the only acceptable way to behave is inflexibly, to resist change at all costs, to remain stunted even as the world around us moves on and makes more sophisticated demands of us.
Is there a lesson here?
Only that I hope you bear this in mind as you engage with your friends and family, elsewhere online, and at 5AM StoryTalk about art – from Star Wars to The Odyssey.
I don’t need you to agree with me or anything I say here. I want you to think — the same way I hope you make me think.
Just…you know…don’t be a dick about it.
We all used to know how to do that, at least those of us who grew up before social media did.
All this said, I loved The Odyssey and I’m deeply exhausted by the people out there who seem to have decided hating Christopher Nolan is as important to them – how they see themselves – as other people feel about religion or, you know, pedophilia in the White House.
Sometimes I want to ask, “Show me on the doll where Christopher Nolan hurt you.”
It’s okay, guys, he makes movies and some of you don’t like them and that’s okay. It’s better than okay. It’s normal.
Someone who didn’t like The Odyssey – and went to great lengths to let us all know how much she dislikes Christopher Nolan’s films, too – is classicist and Homeric translator Emily Wilson. She wrote a scathing review of the film I disagreed with so much I had to write a rebuttal at 5AM StoryTalk – mostly because I think it was filled with intentional distortions and obvious errors that the ex-arts critics in me went a little crazy. There was a professional way to attack the film, but I think this was much more of a hit piece.
My article went viral, much to my surprise. As my friend author and screenwriter Alex Von Tunzelmann said, “It’s terrible when an article escapes containment.”
Case in point: my comments section was flooded with people who desperately wanted to let me know how right Wilson was about how terrible Nolan is. Very few of my critics cared about the carefully enumerated examples of a brilliant scholar getting things wrong – which I refuse to believe was accidental because, as I said, brilliant.
You can read what I had to say about Wilson’s “review” here. Note the quotation marks there, because I use that word carefully. As I said, it’s much more of a personal hit piece.
You’ll also find a link to one of my epic screenplay breakdowns of The Odyssey – see what I did there?
Epic, epic poem, epic film.
It’s okay, my kids hate my little word games, too.
Anyway, I don’t typically breakdown a whole film, preferring to take a look at scenes or whole acts, but this time around, I wanted to use The Odyssey as a way to better understand the adaptation process and, specifically, how adaptations of historical source material like Homer’s poem works. There’s just as much there for people who loved the film, to help you develop stronger skills at interrogating and understanding films and art in general.
I’m going to keep today’s edition of The Brew short. You’ll notice I haven’t published as many podcast episodes as usual lately, and that’s because I’m focused on this TV pilot rewrite and the rewrite of my commercial feature spec. The frank reality is, I’m trying to prioritize me and my mental health more lately – sorry! – which has led to this.
For those following my latest creative journey, I’ll talk about the feature spec more in another episode, but the feedback on my first draft was incredible. I’m diving into my second draft now, feeling very confident that I’m on the right track.
So, I’ll leave you now, as I do every with every edition of The Brew, with a quote from an artist for you to reflect on. This one is from screenwriter and director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and Dune). He said:
“I still don’t understand some images from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. There are pieces I am still struggling to try and find the real meaning of. I feel I understand different meanings of it as I grow up. It’s the power of cinema.”
This is a possibility we should all leave ourselves open to when we engage with films and any other kind of art form.
I still recall an English literature professor telling me once that Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn changes for us, meaning one thing to us as kids, then as young adults, and so on. Did the artwork change or did we?
This is my way of saying: what we love and hate when it comes to art isn’t who we are as human beings because we are always evolving. Leave yourself open to being surprised by art again and again as you grow up and older and hopefully wiser.
This installment of 5AM StoryTalk is free for all, my friends. If you take anything from it, feel free to share it across the multiverse!
Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' Script Blows Up All the Rules
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March 16, 2024
Regardless of how you feel about Oppenheimer as a film, it’s impossible to ignore how innovative its screenplay is. In fact, it’s so audaciously inventive that many professional screenwriters I know have taken to griping about it, citing it as — and I’m paraphrasing here — “the kind of bullshit only
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