Picture this:

This weekend, our daughter visited us. While she was here she let us watch the rough cut of a short film she’s producing. And then she and I talked about how much effect on a film the editor has, how much each decision an editor makes affects the final work.

But I drew no parallel with the process of editing written narrative. Really, I didn’t. We were talking about movies. And I don’t want to draw that false parallel here either.

The more interesting part of the conversation, I think, was about the relationship between character and story—a discussion we all took part in. Our daughter listened as we described what we knew of the characters in her short film from the little things they had done on screen during those ten rough-cut minutes. And we talked of what we understood the backstory to be from what we knew of the characters. I realized we were projecting forward and backward from what we saw in the simple present of the film.

This led our daughter to thoughts about another project. She asked me about character motivation within a script she has already commissioned. And I gave her my thoughts on whom I thought the characters in that other story would likely be, given what she said they would do within the story. (Yeah, I know, what do I know?)

Later, I watched her quickly map out a sequence of events and an ensemble of characters for a project that came to her, it seems, only on Sunday.

It was a weekend of narratives — visual narratives.

Somewhere along the way, I thought that all those years of movie watching (she was addicted to Hollywoodland movies before she could talk — I’m not kidding) — all those years had powerfully formulated for our daughter a useful sense of the plot-character relationship even as they made her into a visual thinker.

(I should say that through her teen years she was also a devoted reader of 19th Century novels.)

Before she got on the plane, the three of us also talked long about what comes next — for her, for us, for her older brother. And I realized that we all look at our lives with an eye toward constructing feasible scenarios and defensible histories.

So often have I argued that narrative is hardwired into the human brain. But this weekend I had a second thought — that story is the basis of our sense of self.

For a certain kind of character, realizing this while driving his grown daughter to the airport can be a great deal like the sensation he has finding his own face in a photograph from a time when he was as young as she is now.

"It seemed a romantic business..." (F. Scott Fitzgerald on the rise and fall of a "literary man")

In 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this in The Crack Up, a self-searching three-part series for Esquire.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation -- the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the “impossible,” come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man -- you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived; you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied -- but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.

Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to “succeed” -- and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills -- domestic, professional, and personal -- then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the center -- things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for the next day. I was living hard, too, but: “Up to forty-nine it’ll be all right,” I said. “I can count on that. For a man who’s lived as I have, that’s all you could ask.”

And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized I had prematurely cracked.

Read the rest here. And then get back to work.

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button": Did you love it or hate it?

Earlier this week, Colleen and I went to see "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", the extraordinary movie based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I loved it. Colleen not s'much. (I was sitting there choked in tears at the end of the three hour film, so I only vaguely remember her saying something about "watching paint dry.") I want to see it again, so I'm trying to get the Gare Bear to go with me this weekend, but I won't be surprised if he reacts the same way Colleen did.

The movie is long. And odd. It requires patience and a complete suspension of disbelief that modern audiences simply aren't trained for, so you've got to be in the right mood for it. The same is true of the short story, though the story and script have very little in common -- at least superficially.

The story is very Fitzgerald (though it's not an example of his best writing, IMHO), and the setting -- Baltimore during the industrial revolution, Spanish American War, roaring twenties -- is far removed from the movie, which is set in New Orleans between WWI and Hurricane Katrina. That shift in time and geography has a major impact on the characters, of course. The story is sort of absurdist or maybe Kafkaesque. It's very short and wry and walks us briskly through the pragmatic challenges of Benjamin's backwards life while the movie takes time to be sentimental, philosophical, and rich with beautifully wrought images. The women in the story are a lot less noble than the movie women, typical of Fitz, and made me newly sad for him and Zelda, two people who loved and tortured each other famously.

When Fitzgerald included the story in his collection Tales of the Jazz Age, he had this to say about it:

This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler's "Note-books."

The story was published in "Collier's" last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati:

"Sir--

I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will."

The two Benjamin Buttons -- screen and story -- seem to have in common a serious case of love-it-or-hate-it. As someone who often feels out of sync with the rest of the world, I loved them both.

We're interested in your thoughts. Anyone else see the movie this week?

Read "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and the rest of Tales of the Jazz Age in full on Project Gutenberg.