METAPHORS II

. . . Cont'd

It’s the writer/director’s prerogative to choose the symbols and symbolic action; at the same time, one shouldn’t forget that television and advertising has inculcated the present-day audiences to refuse manipulative symbols or over-earnest metaphors for want of conviction and tangibility. Metaphoric settings, acts, and objects need to be natural and drawn from the world in which the characters live. If they are portrayed as forced they seem artificial and distant.

Mostly in cinema the magic lies in the possibilities of expressing the inner experience of central characters through an array of chosen settings, objects and atmospheres. These elements function metaphorically or symbolically as channels to deeper issues. This’s the scope screenwriters have to foresee while developing metaphoric clues and settings.

An amazing example of blending metaphor into cinematic conflict is in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993): Ada, a young, mute immigrant, arrives with her illicit daughter and her piano in 19^th century New Zealand. Her intention is to marry a person she doesn’t know or probably love; and the man doesn’t much appreciate her piano either. As eventually, the piano is kept at another man’s house, the latter makes her life warm and instills internal promise and solace, and she submits herself to that man, irrespective of her husband existing.

In this particular world of the story the environment is unavoidably cruel, and love strangled by respectability, expression beyond language, and the soul connected with music and censored sensuality. How otherwise can you define a better work of metaphor?

And when characters play metaphorical roles in an allegory, the writer has to show his craft to typify each character and allocate each character with an archetypal uniqueness. These are very efficient to explain character depths and their worlds. Developing the backdrops and the conflicts typified by metaphors will help the writer-director to explain to actors how you want each to play their role and why.

Paul Cox’s Cactus (1985) portrays “the developing relationship between an angry and desperate woman losing her sight and a withdrawn young man who is already blind. The man makes refuge a cactus house, and she visits him there to see what he can tell her about her fate. The cacti are dry, hostile, and spiky, but also phallic, and the setting becomes emblematic of his predicament. In a sexually charged world, he has turned his back on intimacy and intends to survive self-punitively in a place devoid of tenderness and nourishment.”

Coming back to the basic question—metaphoric conflict—my answer is, as long as the metaphor induces the conflict or the metaphor is more inducing than anything else to provoke the conflict better, then metaphoric conflict is the choice. As a Screenwriter, I’m of the opinion that metaphor is NOT more important than conflict, in the screenplay.

METAPHORS I

Today in my Screenwriting session at LV Prasad Film & TV Academy, one of my students, Guru, asked me an interesting question: What if there’s a ‘metaphoric conflict’ in a screenplay? Of course yes; as long as it’s a conflict, I don’t care if it’s a metaphor or not. If there’s no conflict there’s no story.

But do we really know what a ‘metaphoric conflict’ is? I told Guru I’ll write this out in my blog today; though it’s a little tiring to write amid my other screenwriting commitments.

Do we really know what metaphor is? And conflict?

The roots of metaphor are in storytelling. As far back as AD 400 storytellers would explain information and philosophies to villagers by way of stories, using words to inspire the imaginations of the people who rarely saw anything beyond their village. Even Jesus spread his doctrines mainly through parables (metaphoric stories).

Metaphors draw resemblances. Tiger: a ferocious person; Pussycat: a gentle person. Metaphors paint pictures with words and so add vigor to a screenwriter’s range to picture-making-words or picture-writing craft.

Metaphors state that one thing is another thing. ‘Arun leaps around playfully, a young colt in spring’ or ‘he’s is a tough old battleship, battered but still floating’ or ‘there’s mummified twinkle in the dead man’s hand’. You’re not actually saying that the woman is a horse, the man is a boat or the twinkle has gone through the ancient mummification process, but the equivalence still work.

In talking, if a picture paints a thousand words, in screenwriting a metaphor paints a thousand pictures. It’s a word or a phrase which provokes imagery in the mind. The more you make readers ‘picture’ themselves in a situation, the easier it is to draw them into the heart of your story.

Metaphors which have become part of everyday language like “the ball rocketed into the back of the net” are known as dead-metaphors. This term may suggest lifelessness, but in practice, such metaphors, like a set of juggler’s balls, remain in the air.

MIXED METAPHORS combine two separate metaphors into one bold (or somewhat peculiar) statement. This blend of ideas even has its own unofficial name: a mixaphor. If each part of the ‘mixaphor’ relates to the other and if you don’t over do it, it’s worth experimenting with the concept:

Beauty:

For so many years

I was good enough to eat:

The world looked at me

And its mouth watered.

(Randall JARREL, ‘Next Day’)

Brunch – (Breakfast + Lunch)

Brangelina – (Brad Pitt + Angelina)

EXTENDED METAPHORS: An extended metaphor occurs when writing a series of metaphors, one after the other, throughout a piece of story telling. Poets seem to like them, as do lyricists. Here’s an example from Christina Rossetti, where sleep is used as metaphor for death:

Sleeping at Last

Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over,

Sleeping at last, the struggle and horror past,

Cold and White, out of sight of friend and of lover,

Sleeping at last.

No more a tired heart downcast or overcast,

No more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover,

Sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked fast.

Fast Asleep. Singing birds in their leafy cover

Cannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast.

Under the purple thyme and the purple cover

Sleeping at last.

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

There are allegories to cousin metaphors.  It’s actually the ‘next step’ to an extended metaphor. This often gives a moral message by telling the story under the pretext of another subject. Many fairy tales and fables are examples of allegory.

The best way to use metaphor (of any kind) in screenwriting is in passing, rather than focusing too much on its explicit creativity. More often than not, the more you point the reader to an obvious metaphor, the greater the chance of it coming across as joke or even parody of itself. So, like most techniques it’s better to use metaphors wisely and sparingly.

(To be continued  . . .)