[Clive Bradley is a friend and former student of mine. He is a screenwriter and teaches screenwriting. When he sent in his entry for the movie poll, he and I got into an email discussion on aspects of film, and I invited him to write something on the topic.]
'What's the point in fiction?' my student asked. 'Non-fiction, I can see what it's for. But why fiction?' Another explained that he doesn't bother reading novels because he always prefers his own endings. About half the class agreed; they do not read books.
Alarmingly, these are university students and they are studying to be writers. The guy who can't see the point in fiction wants to write television comedy. When it was pointed out to him that he writes fiction too, his response was categorical: television is entirely different.
Part of the explanation for this hostility to the written word must lie in the 'visual culture' that now surrounds us, though other students rejected this: some can watch MTV and read novels. Part, perhaps, lies in failures in the teaching of English. (Hardly any of my students can punctuate.) There may, perhaps, have been an element of macho posturing too.
But I think it also reflects something about the way our culture often talks about fiction on screen, whether film or television. Especially through courses in Media or Film Studies, people learn to think and talk about film especially in terms I will call 'director's stuff' - to understand it through a series of concerns which they imagine to be those of a director. In fact a good director is not concerned only with these things. But by director's stuff I mean, crucially, the technical aspects to film making which media-savvy audiences like to commend themselves for noticing: tracking shots, wide shots, lighting, editing. Or if they've done Film Studies, there is an additional focus: signs, signifiers and whatnot; 'screen language', the 'grammar' of the cut, the camera as male gaze (or critiques of this concept).
It is not that director's stuff is uninteresting or illegitimate. But narrative film (and television) works, or doesn't, because of the underlying structure of its story-telling, the strength of its characters - because of what its story tells us about life. And these are the things which connect the drama we see on screen to the traditions of drama and story-telling which go back to the ancient Greeks, to the Sumerians who composed Gilgamesh, and beyond, surely, to the earliest human societies.
The idea that you can write television comedy without reading Aristophanes is not wrong only because a writer should have a broad knowledge and experience of life, but because comedy has its own traditions, dating back before The Office and Alan Partridge, traditions which good comic writers will strive to understand. Film-makers who know about theatre will make better films. It might not help with positioning the camera, but it will certainly help with character. A broadly literate audience, too, will get more out of what they watch.
Our culture is learning to talk about film and television as a series of technical processes, rather than the underlying human stories these processes should serve. This is the only conceivable explanation, in my view, for the praise heaped recently on Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation. This is a film with no characters. Its two central figures barely register as actual people. (She's graduated in philosophy from Yale? Huh? And what sort of ex-star is he that gets paid two million dollars for a commercial but has no entourage and is not shown round Tokyo by his hosts?). Its secondary characters don't register even as mannequins There are long sequences which appear to have no dramatic purpose at all, and are merely an excuse to point cameras at temples. Did we really need to hear all those songs in their entirety in the karaoke sequence? Much of the humour consists of cheap shots about the Japanese and the letter 'r'. But somehow, abstracted from these considerations - questions a dramatist would ask - the movie is considered 'art'.
It is, I think, this notion of film as 'art' (less true of television, which is assumed to be more humdrum and less of an art form anyway), independently of the human stories it tells, which may encourage a student of writing to believe he doesn't need to read books. I don't wish to blame Media Studies courses for the decline of civilization. But, well, maybe they're playing their part. Indeed, the problem I am describing mainly refers to those who have studied, or taken an interest in, screen drama; for it is the stories which keep mass audiences hooked to EastEnders. Still, the over-concentration on director's stuff has filtered through more widely.
The answer to my student's question - what's the point of fiction? - is that it fulfils a basic human need to account for our experiences through stories, a need as basic as music (to which there is equally no point). I am arguing for approaching screen drama on this level. How does it serve this need?
If I am right, it implies that the hostility to books expressed by my students can be redressed. Literature and drama are not outside the culture of which young people feel a part, but an enriching aspect of it. We just need to change the way we increasingly think, talk and teach about the media. (Clive Bradley)