Introduce Yourself : An Intellectual Striving for Substantive Narrative by Dr. Skip Worden

I'm coming from academia, complete with a diction suited to recondite treatises. After publishing one of those books, I felt like I had miss an opportunity to write for a much wider audience. Additionally, I noticed that I tend to quote lines from movies rather than the likes of Kant and Plato (though I do enjoy drawing on Nietzsche even in conventional conversations). In school, I took a few classes in acting (two of the three employing psycho-drama) and three more in film studies (concentrating on narrative and film history), even as I was getting degrees in business and the humanities (historical practical philosophy). I have since read books on screen writing. I especially like the structuralism in "The Screenwriter's Bible." So after I wrote a novel (still to be revised), I tried my hand at a screenplay. The main character is a mortgage producer who writes liars loans. I try to relate this moral wrong to others that are typically not related as they are believed to be disparate, such as recklessly getting a woman pregnant or infecting someone with AIDS. I believe that too many movies follow a superficial or otherwise well-travelled plotline. so I would like to ground narrative not in complexity for novelty but, rather, in contending basic principles. Making transparent a societal blind-spot in an intellectually-engaging way seems to me like a worthy function of film, whether made by a Hollywood studio or by an independent. "The Matrix" is an excellent example of Hollywood making transparent an old philosophical theory--in this case, that of solipsism, or "the mind in a vat." "Visual story-telling, whether on a stage or in film, " can indeed unearth theories and ideas otherwise buried in historical philosophy into the light of day for us today. Even as an intellectual, I tend to quote lines in film to make even ideational points because unlike passages I have read, a line in a film (or on a stage) is etched in my memory in more than one of the senses (i.e., hearing, sight). Admittedly, some passages I have read, like "caritas naturalis seu benevolentia universalis" have not found the light of day in cinema :) But even such an academic line is the leitmotif of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice." The antagonist, who insists on a pound of flesh, is operating on the basis of "public legal justice," which is antithetical to justice as love and benevolence. So contemporary "visual story-telling" is not so far from the ideas otherwise locked up in historical philosophy. I must admit that when my professor of historical philosophy who taught a course on justice as love and benevolence included "The Merchant of Venice" among the 14 books in the syllabus (I didn't see many movies that semester), I felt that the inclusion of a playwright as an affront to philosophy and academia in general. To put Shakespeare among Plato, Augustine, and Leibniz seemed to me to constitute a category mistake, logically. Yet in the years since the course, I came to appreciate and even value Shakespeare's use of "visual story-telling" to present justice as love and benevolence as against the ascending theory of public legal justice that we all know so well today. Sadly, the other has receded largely into the pages of history. It is nice when those pages come alive in our visual story-telling today. That is to say, there is a lot to be said of such story-telling in terms of substantive content that engages the mind. I do not buy the stereotyped false dichotomy that has Hollywood only capable nowadays of mindless action flicks and cheesy overly-emotive romance dramas. A leitmotif can indeed draw on substantive ideas, one being the subterranean protagonist and its antipodal rival being the underlying antagonist. In this sense, I think of writing a screenplay as a bit like writing a symphony score in being multi-level with the strings, for example, playing a slow, underlying "undercurrent" melody while the horns play a more pressing, and thus attention-grabbing, punctuated melody--and the two being related even though they are of different lengths. Try your hand at singing "caritas naturalis, seu benevolentia universalis" and you will have it! :)