Some thoughts on writing and reading, and the new movie by Pedro Almodovar

You all must know by now that I'm not a rules guy, but that I'm for anything and everything that serves the purpose of the writer. In all cases, what looks good to the writer's eye seems to me a good rule to follow, the only rule, provided the writer has a good eye. In the case of so-called 'creative writing,' two words often used to connote what is otherwise known as 'literature,' final editorial decisions must not go perforce to the style-books, as they must to writers of journalism or other forms of non-creative writing--but to the writer. The writer must insist on the freedom of having his or her eye determine the visual and aural language of composition; if the writer wishes to follow the rules of punctuation, grammar etc. that is his or her choice, as it is his or her choice to not follow them, to trust instead the unruly order of the heart and mind that could say just about anything and then does say exactly that. And isn't the wild 'anything' the best a writer can hope for and the best his or her reader can ever hope to see and hear?

I think here of William Carlos Williams and his writing almost one hundred years ago, "If they give you lined paper, write the other way," while thinking also of Williams taking great exception to a poem by his contemporary, E.E. Cummings, who'd written a poem that relied almost entirely on its visual construction, calling Cummmings' poem, "nothing but a grocery list." Even among writers with no rules there are rules; or unruled writers who urge rules on everybody but themselves.

I'll get to the new movie by Almodovar in a moment. First I'd like to remark about how fortunate writers were to live and write in the age before film. The pressure of performance then was all on the writer, the writer provided not only the 'story,' but also the visual imagery and the soundtrack. I could make a case that Tolstoy's War and Peace is the greatest symphony every written, if I had the time and inclination. Abel Gance's six-hour movie of the life of Napoleon, Napoleon, was a silent film; filmed in 1927, the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, the original title happened to be, Napoleon vu par Abel Gance.

The infancy of any art provides the greatest opportunities for art freedom, the kind of non-categorizable products that are engaging to both writer and reader. As a writer Anthony Trollope had no cinematic reference point, and was free to write about people wih names like Mr. Quiverful, Dr. Proudie, and John Bold and places like Puddingdale, with the reasonably expectation that a reader would accept the far-fetched with the equanimity of true belief. Celine on the other hand wrote cinematically, living in the early glory days of moving images when sound was finally added to film. An imaginative reader today is able to read Trollope as Celine and Celine as Trollope, to discern the possibility of Trollope writing Death on the Installment Plan, and Celine writing Barchester Towers had he been fluent in English and born fifty years before he was born.

Almodovar's new movie, Julieta, is based on three short stories by the Canadian writer Alice Munro. Almodovar has said that he considers himself a writer first and then a film-maker. Every word in his film is said to be scripted, that is written-out first and then spoken as if spoken directly from a book; improvisation by actors in an Almodovar film is verboten. Once I learned that Almodovar thinks of himself as a writer, I saw his films differently. Now they're all about color and color's effect on consciousness, no matter what any of his characters are saying.