Sunday, July 1, 2007

Confession #7

I am a Hollywood cliche.

I am an uptight guy in love with a free spirit girl.

Its not that people never write about uptight girls being changed by free spirit boys. I can think of a few examples. "Titanic" being the most obvious. "The African Queen" is one of my favorites, and I think half of that if from watching Kate Hepburn play the prudish woman who gets set free by a charming rogue instead of the woman who sets some charming dork free. But it doesn't compared with the number of stories that come to mind about a lovable nerd being transformed by a woman who is borderline insane.

There's a song called "I Love You Because" from an off-Broadway musical of the same name. You could change the character names and insert this song into anything from "Bringing Up Baby" to "Stranger Than Fiction." If my own life were a musical, this is the song we'd sing to each other.

But the interesting thing - to me anyways - is that its the romantic theme of almost every story idea I've had, many of them long before I was with my girlfriend (or not-girlfriend since she's demanding the cliched break that all free spirits demand at some point or another in modern romances.) In fact, one of them started out based on an entirely different girl I liked at an entirely different time in my life, and yet the end result came out a lot more like the girl I ended up with then the girl it was meant to be about. I'm not sure I even follow that sentence, so don't worry if you don't, lol.

I've assumed for some time that I write girls like this because that's the kind of girl I fell in love with. But now I wonder if I fell for her because I was destined by my own subconscious needs to want a girl just like her. Do I like movies with this sort of coupling because it mirrors my own? Or did I couple myself in such a way so as to mirror my favorite movies? Is it really such a common theme in the world at large, or is it just a shared common theme in the lives of the the dorky guys who write the majority of Hollywood screenplays?

Or maybe its just the rule of magnetic opposites hard-wired into our own souls to keep us from intellectually sensible relationships that would assuredly result in disaster (and boring movies). Two free spirits end up dead like Bonnie and Clyde. Two nerds end up... well, I can't even think of a movie that tried this because its so boring just to think about. Its why we love Buffy with Spike or Angel, but never Riley.

And... well, that's all. I feel compelled to wrap up blog posts like their articles in a magazine that need to make perfect sense. But most of what I think about is just musings. This often keeps me from blogging because I feel I have no real point. But I guess that's ok.

3 comments:

MaryAn Batchellor said...

Does who I am affect what I write or does what I write affect who I am? I've heard professionals ask this same question in more than one way.

Unknown said...

Why do you hate Chinatown? Just curious.

Abhii said...

Nice buddy i liked ur story..
keep on writing