Day 14 Assignments

[Christopher Carlson]

Christopher Carlson Delivers Irony!

What I learned doing this assignment is always be on the lookout for potential irony — a sure method of enriching the script.

1) In opening scene, Helen is swimming skillfully in a small lake.

– IRONY: Little do we know that she’s blind and deaf and that one ankle is tied to a boat anchored on the shore.

2) The filmmakers express a need to add ‘adventure and romance’ to Helen’s life story.

– IRONY: Helen is one of the most unique individuals on the planet, the first blind/deaf person to graduate from a university – an interior adventure, an ‘adventure’ of the mind; Helen is probably one of the most ‘romantic’ individuals they will ever meet, someone truly in love with the world and all its creatures, and also a person who has sustained a romance for 25 years, albeit a platonic ‘romance of the mind,’ with Teacher.

3) Helen pleads with John Macy to return to Teacher and their marriage.

– IRONY: In actuality, Helen is probably the primary cause of the dissolution of the marriage because she requires so much of Teacher’s attention, leaving John Macy feeling neglected and less important than Helen in the long run.

4) Helen and Teacher lament the end of Teacher’s marriage to John Macy.

IRONY: In this same moment, two songbirds summon each other from the porch to apple tree in a display of simple love in nature’s kingdom.

5) Helen brings Peter to her special island and they make love for the first time.

IRONY: Helen waits until Teacher has left Wrentham for an unknown amount of time before moving forward with Peter.

6) Kate comes to Wrentham to watch over Helen while Teacher’s away.

IRONY: During the period of time when Helen is under the watch of her mother, Helen engages in the very thing — being sexual with another person — that would be most objectionable to her.

[Heather Hood]

Heather Delivers Irony!

What I learned doing this assignment is I write with a lot of irony already, sort of expecting people to pick up on it. The problem is, I’m not sure it’s really clear what I’m trying to get across. This is where the need for other people comes in, so you can pass your work around and have other people weigh in on whether they understood what you were trying to do or say. Writing can be an isolating process. Throw in a disability and a pandemic and you’ve got a fantastic cocktail for isolation.

I just wanted to tell a story that opened our eyes to the horrible things we do to each other, using Canada as an example, since I’m Canadian and know the history from a personal perspective.

The one good thing about movies is they stay with you long after ‘The End’ is splashed across the screen.

ASSIGNMENT

With your list of the New Ways / Insights you
want audiences to experience, go through these steps:

Step 1. What is the New Way / Insight you want to deliver?

1. Insight: When everything is taken from you, the only thing left is integrity.

2. Insight: Family is what you create, not who you are born to.

3. Insight: You can let life just happen or you can create it.

Step 2. How could you deliver that insight through opposite experiences?

1. Show moments where everything is lost and the characters are exhibiting integrity.

·
In the box car scene
across BC, Jian Min is teaching Andrew to control his temper using martial arts
techniques. Andrew gets angry, wanting to stick to his old ways and puts his
fist thru a crate. Jian Min says, “Only lost man fight that way. Are you lost?”
He replies, “Look at me.” Implying his threadbare, filthy appearance makes him
look like a wretch. Jian Min just weighs the state of his soul and says, “When
all is lost, Integrity remains.”

Step 1. Where could you build opposite
experiences into your screenplay?

Everything is taken from Andrew: his job, his family, his pride – BUT

· he is given respect by the waiter on the train, asking if he may thank him for his service. He is expecting to be kicked out of the 1^st class car.

· He finds there is no work for him in Montreal because he is Irish, but the warehouse workers give him food, in thanks for bringing the young mother out of the weather. He is expecting to be told off for being above his station.

· The prospector gives him the map to the gold claim and tells him he’s a good man, even though he tries to hide it. The prospector has been telling him he’s foolish for refusing to abandon two inexperienced boys in rough Barkerville.

· Jian Min asks Andrew to be Meilin’s guardian as he is dying. He expects Meilin’s husband will want her back, since her father is dead.

· When Andrew sees the Jesuit Priests are being held prisoner, he trades his freedom for theirs.
OR.

Step 2. What is the New Way / Insight you want to deliver through them?

· I suppose one new insight might be: The right thing is hard to do, it’s the best choice. But it doesn’t always mean you win.

Come up with at least five (5) different ways
you can create IRONY in your screenplay and deliver an insight.

o The most ironic thing in the whole screenplay is Andrew’s daughter, the one he’s been trying so hard to bring to Canada, isn’t even his. She’s Big Dan’s. The product of rape and Dan doesn’t know anything about her until late into the third act. -> Insight: Family doesn’t have to be related by blood.

o The other ironic thing is Andrew, who was an Ottoman slave in his youth, allows himself to be captured by the Tsimshian so the Jesuits can go free. – Yet- ironically, this turns out to be a good experience for him because they value him as a hunter and provider.->Insight: The right thing is hard to do, but it’s the best choice.

o AND just when Andrew finally gets a family of his own, he has to make a decision: to save the children on the river ice with the help of Jordan, ONLY to get shot by Billy (the betraying character) and swept beneath the ice. .->Insight: The right thing is hard to do, but it doesn’t always mean you win.

o And we learn as Andrew is dying that he was trying to save his nephew, NOT kill the idiot Englishman who started the trouble back in Ireland. It was just dry rot on the ship that landed them both in the harbor. .->Insight: The right thing is hard to do, but it doesn’t always mean you win.

o Jian Min is a high ranked diplomat in China yet in North America he is looked down on. In Juneau the party comes across a rabid mob of frontier folk lynching the man who took his daughter. Rather than use violence, Jian Min offers to use his expertise to try the case: An eye for an eye sort of punishment and gives the man to the family as a serf for ten years. Insight->All life has value. (I have to write this scene to replace another)

[Julia Keefer]

What I learned is that I must imagine the split screen or superimposition of cinema to enhance my linguistic ability to use irony so that I can sequence and juxtapose scenes that seem like the opposite but that force characters into insights that transform them. An important element of creativity is Janusian (the door opens both ways) and is one way to inject comedy, satire, and depth to events and actions that may just be taken literally otherwise.

Jake’s transformation from irony occurs in increments. At the beginning his sense of humor is ebullient but as his optimism is challenged by medical and environmental and villain disasters he, unlike Candide, makes sarcastic comments about the beautiful weather during floods and the advantages of having your buddies die–more kids and a wife. The ultimate irony occurs when he gets PD and temporarily succumbs to bad habits with food, drink, and laziness that his clients had over the years. Then he pulls himself up to the cliff with Litonya’s and his kids’ help and transforms even more to help himself and others. Irony crystallizing into biting satire may be more the voices of the Magma Monsters and Ibrahim, master of the high concept plot. Ibrahim and BB are also victims of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, saving the earth to kill the weak, old, fat etc., or the win/loss of collateral damage when their loved ones die, in part from their actions or negligence. Since I must develop this high concept plot as I review the first two novels, it is stressful because I don’t want to get rid of good things I wrote 15 years ago. Irony provides a window for things that may not fit in that can lead to originality or humor.