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While an abused woman may sometimes approach a counselor and describe her struggle straightforwardly, an abuser speaks in terms that are less direct. He seeks help not because he senses that he is abusive but because he is tired of the tension in his home or is afraid that his relationship is going to split up. He will not typically volunteer the fact that he swears, tears his partner down, or frightens her. If he is physically violent, he will almost certainly make no spontaneous mention of that fact. However, he may give various hints. Some common ones include:
“I have a bad temper, and I lose my cool sometimes.”
“My girlfriend claims that I don’t treat her right.”
“My partner is always making eyes at other men.”
“My wife attacked me, so I had to defend myself, and she got hurt.”
Various guidelines for law enforcement personnel are included in Chapter 12. I will review just three critical points here: (1) Abusers need to suffer consequences for their actions now, not just receive warnings of future sanctions, which have little impact on abusers. (2) He can’t overcome his abuse problem by dealing with anything other than the abuse. Working on stress or anger management, alcoholism, or relationship dynamics will have little or no impact on a man’s abusiveness. (3) Criticism from people in positions of authority can sometimes have the greatest impact of any fallout that abusers experience. On the other hand, language from professionals that excuses or minimizes abuse, or that attributes responsibility partly to the victim—as in the case of a probation officer who says to a man: “You and your wife really need to work out your issues and stop abusing each other”—makes an important contribution to enabling the abuser.
If the abuser is the children’s father or father figure, take particular caution not to speak badly of him as a person but only to name and criticize his actions. Children do not want to hear that their dad is mean, selfish, or bad. In cases where the abuser is dangerous, it is helpful to discuss the risks with the children, both to help them protect themselves and to validate their reality. However, even a violent, dangerous abuser is a human being, and children tend to be acutely tuned in to the humanity of anyone they know well. Don’t talk about him as if he were a monster. You can say, for example, “Your dad has a problem that makes him unsafe sometimes, doesn’t he?” These are terms that make sense to children.
Anger and conflict are not the problem; they are normal aspects of life. Abuse doesn’t come from people’s inability to resolve conflicts but from one person’s decision to claim a higher status than another. So while it is valuable, for example, to teach nonviolent conflict-resolution skills to elementary school students—a popular initiative nowadays—such efforts contribute little by themselves to ending abuse. Teaching equality, teaching a deep respect for all human beings—these are more complicated undertakings, but they are the ones that count.
There were many people in France writing realistic novels in the nineteenth century—Balzac comes to mind—but Flaubert was the most conscious of what he was doing, and agonized about it the most. Closely observed reality, for its own sake, had not really been a part of the tradition of literature in the eighteenth century. Flaubert will spend a whole page evoking tiny sounds and motes of dust in an empty room because he's getting at something. He's saying there's meaning to be got out of the very closely observed events of ordinary reality. In literary, scientific and photographic terms—the invention of photography happened when he was in his teens—the nineteenth century, to a much greater degree than the eighteenth, was concerned with the close observation of reality. All of science in the nineteenth century was about very close observation of small things…. The nineteenth century focussed and greatly expanded these concepts. It made them central to the novel, to the symphony, to painting.
O: There's a line of Saul Bellow's—“I write to discover the next room of my fate.” In this way, I think, many novels are self-portraits—or future self-portraits, self-explorations, even if the story is set in an alien situation. You can try on this costume, that costume.
M: Somebody once asked W. H. Auden, “Is it true that you can write only what you know?”And he said,“Yes it is. But you don't know what you know until you write it.” Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.
As I began to eliminate things, I would have the feeling that I couldn't remove a certain scene, because it so clearly expressed what we were after. But after hesitating, I'd cut it anyway … forced to because of the length of the film. Then I'd have this paradoxical feeling that by taking away something I now had even more of it. It was almost biblical in its idea of abundance. How can you take away something and wind up with more of it?
The analogy I came up with was the image of a room illuminated by a bare blue lightbulb. Let's say the intention is to have “blueness” in this room, so when you walk in you see a bulb casting a blue light. And you think, This is the source of the blue, the source of all blueness. On the other hand, the lightbulb is so intense, so unshaded, that you squint. It's a harsh light. It's blue, but it's so much what it is that you have to shield yourself from it.
There are frequently scenes that are the metaphorical equivalent of that bulb. The scene is making the point so directly that you have to mentally squint. And when you think, What would happen if we got rid of that blue lightbulb, you wonder, But then where will the blue come from? Let's take it out and see. That's always the key: Let's just take it out and find out what happens.
So you unscrew the lightbulb … there are other sources of light in the room. And once that glaring source of light is gone, your eyes open up. The wonderful thing about vision is that when something is too intense, your irises close down to protect against it—as when you look at the sun. But when there is less light, your eye opens up and makes more of the light that is there.
M: One of the side benefits of moving Zoetrope up to San Francisco in 1969 was to take the filmmaking out of a self-contained film universe. In Los Angeles it's very easy, if you get to a certain level in your profession, to live, breathe, eat, think, sleep film. And to have so many offers that you're working all the time—without that ability, given by time and space, to reinvent.
In San Francisco there's not that much work. There aren't that many producers up here. There's a kind of enforced idleness between projects that allows you to develop other interests and then, in the best sense, to plow the results of those interests back into the next film.
It has to be said—both systems have their risks. The risk of the Hitchcock-ian system is that you may stifle the creative force of the people who are collaborating with you. The film that results—even if it's a perfect vision of what somebody had in his head—can be lifeless: it seems to exist on its own, without the necessary collaboration either of the people who made the film or even, ultimately, the audience. It says: I am what I am whether you like it or not.
On the other hand, the risk with the process-driven film is that it can collapse into chaos. Somehow the central organizing vision can be so eaten away and compromised by all the various contributors that it collapses under its own weight.
You remember you told me how much you liked the line breaks in my translations of Malaparte? The decision where to cut film is very similar to the decision, in writing poetry, of where to end each line. On which word? That end point has little if anything to do with the grammar of the sentence. It's just that the line is full and ripe at that point, full of meaning and ripe with rhythm. By ending it where he does, the poet exposes that last word to the blankness of the page, which is a way of emphasizing the word. If he adds two words after it, he immerses that word within the line, and it has less visibility, less significance. We do very much the same in film: the end of a shot gives the image of that last frame an added significance, which we exploit.