Language, words, and the effects of time

Language and What it Does

Where are all the humbling, memorable, well-crafted stories about believable characters fighting for hope and survival in our climate-changing, globalized and fragile world? What's happened to the screenwriters who once upon a time craftily juxtaposed compelling characters with down-to-earth and/or tragic Earthly events? Is it now considered passe to employ character-powered narrative that helps the underdog overcome conniving, selfish culprits and extraordinarily complex situations in lusty scenes from today's changing world? When it comes to embracing 2012-style pragmatism -- which could and should branch out to naturalism and realism -- has quality storytelling disappeared forever from the entertainment genre called film?

Tired Predictable Plots Cry Out for Quality Narrative

When shelling out good money to be informed and/or stimulated in those ubiquitous multiplex buildings that house the projectors and sell busloads of buttered popcorn, why is it so seldom that a real-life feature film -- not necessarily a documentary -- presented with more than flair and fluff, with substance and style, is projected upon the enormous white screen? Riveting real-world storytelling has apparently flown away, like the helium balloon that slipped out of the fingers of a face-painted 4-year-old at her backyard birthday party and disappears into the blue sky as little girl tears flow far below.

But we digress. Do any writers today have the courage to indulge audiences with storytelling that reaches back to ancient strategies and approaches naturalism and realism vis-a-vis verified, empirical science? Where is the irony, the tragedy, the drama-based for example on a little boy who is tearfully empathetic with the plight of critically endangered California Condors that, after approaching near extinction, were taken into a captive breeding program then re-released back into the wild?

Aristotle, were he here upon the earth today, would employ his tragic formula for the integrity of the genre. The righteous telling of the tale -- is it, too, an endangered species?

Aristotle would find the reversal of fortune that has raped the habitat for California's Desert Tortoise a perfect worldly conundrum for his tragic plot structure. The iconic philosopher's work would be a boon to an otherwise milquetoast gaggle of writers penning superficial sagas of drunk college boys in Las Vegas with their hideously brutal hangovers.

For Aristotle, the inspiration he would draw from the story of the severely endangered California Condor would transcend simple storytelling and explode into a dynamic postmodern drama. First Aristotle's strategy for tragedy is the powerful reversal of fortune theme. Using naturalism, Aristotle would paint powerful brush-strokes across an imaginative canvas with thousands of Condors soaring in the clear skies with their 9-1/2-foot wingspans as they bred and prospered in the post-Pleistocene period.

Time elapses with grace, but by the 20th century men with guns are blowing them out of the sky. Condors eat dead squirrels but the colossal birds also consume the poisons intended only for those squirrels. The Condors talk to each other, fearing extinction, introducing naturalism. In 1985 the last 22 Condors are plucked from their tortured habitat and taken to the San Diego Zoo and other venues for captive breeding.

Fast forward to 2012. An Aristotelian plot structure with mind-bending irony -- first utilizing the reversal of fortune followed by society's recognition (anagnorisis -- a sudden discovery) that takes people from ignorance to knowledge -- could be a model useful for an enterprising screenwriter delving into the Condor's fate. The reversal of fortune is the demise of the Condor due to human interventions, intended and unintended. That many informed humans have gone from ignorance to knowledge completes the second part of Aristotle's plot formula.

As to the irony in proposed Aristotelian plot, take Oedipus Rex, for example. In the masterpiece by Sophocles, Oedipus launches an investigation into who murdered his father, and learns to his chagrin and shock that he alone murdered his father. A screenwriter in 2012 that is blending real-world reality with fictional / naturalism narrative would be to have the father of a little boy (who is fascinated with these enormous birds with the longest wingspan of any bird in North America) investigate -- at the urging of his son -- the reasons some recently released California Condors are seriously ill and dying.

It turns out the father is a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), a group that refuses to accept the empirical science that shows Condors are poisoned when eating the carcasses of deer and other critters that have been shot with lead bullets. The father's investigation ironically points to his own organization as helping to kill Condors and he can't bear to tell his son, who is already heartbroken that some Condors are dying. This Oedipus-like irony could be considered Aristotelian. it's a father-son plot drenched in angst, descriptively genuine, written with the literary weapons of the future of hope colliding with history.