Movies with No Plot

I’m writing a script for two actors, one male and one female—both descended from Africa, raised in America. You can call them ‘African Americans’ but you might want to call them American Africans after serious world travel and sensitivity. These two meet in a Caribbean resort for six days of talking—no sex… just talking. This is a play of dialog—a play of revelation. This work has been dismissed by a noted professional actor of color—that will go unnamed—as a play with no plot, that evidently does not interest her at all.

So I look at films like My Dinner with Andre and I just finished watching Before Sunset—the sequel to 1995s Before Sunrise and I see plays of dialog with no plot. I see only revelation and the implied assumption that the audience are interested in these characters because of the popularity and talent of the actors (in that order). Now we go back to our dismissive actor of color with my implication and I conclude that this seasoned professional is finding yet another way to say that a North American audience is not interested in subtle plays of dialog between people of color in a structure that is not reinforced with the concrete storytelling of a giant mason like August Wilson.

My next grocery bill does not directly depend on my writing—for humans (for machines is a different story). So I will go on without the validation of ‘humanity’ and experiment with the possibility that someone other than myself wants to see work with real adult contemporary themes for English-speaking people with strong African features. And when the African features are strong, the following concepts in fiction are questioned:

• The superiority of romantic love and the assumption that it is a desired destination.
• The desire to preserve individuality to the exclusion of any form of collective responsibility—providing, say, escapism in a time of war.
• The assumption that regular sexual activity is a grand prize of the privileged few instead of a lifestyle activity necessary for human health.
• The isolation of sexual behavior from a larger system of human interaction. (This fails to blur the line between sexual intercourse and social intercourse between consenting adults to make it all just one big intercourse.)Unless I am writing about hippie free love in some drug den, most of these assumptions are accepted in fiction as real life forever—the ‘human condition.’ My fiction would remind the audience that these ‘assumptions’ are peculiar problems—by-products—of patriarchy based on a dominator culture founded on the Greek concept of the individual. Don’t assume, English-speaker, this is ponderous pretension that will weigh down work with ‘heady’ academic dogma. Just remember that when Kurasawa does a dialog scene as a two-shot instead of a bunch of over-the-shoulder one-shots he is trying to ‘teach’ you about the collectivism being equal to individuality (among other things). This is very important in our contemporary American “ownership society.”

So artists go to art school and they learn about art. Sounds harmless. Right? However, when I show my African features—when I am not compelled to hide my heritage in order to make others feel comfortable—then I no longer see artists and I no longer see art. I see creative people learning how to express themselves using tools and techniques that come from a specific culture. My theory of relativity comes in to upset the classical model of the mechanical universe.

I am sure that my colored actor friend would pat me on the head, agree with me and then get on with real life. She might go see a play on Broadway—and that play might be The Lion King. But we should agree that director Julie Taymor and choreographer Garth Fagan are drawing on sources outside of ‘normal’ artistic sources to make a ‘respectable’ commercial success.

Further readings around this context can start with two articles: “The World Wide Floyd Webb 2004” and “Blazed Up with The Undefined”—both at kintespace.com of course.

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