Stump The Doc

On Wednesday morning I checked--the department had put my paper in the professor's box. The professor being the famous (and infamous) Dr. Drew Casper, who is so manic you don't need coffee for his class. You can say many things about him--and trust me, in the back of Norris Theatre, we've said them all--but he does love movies. He's seen every single movie ever made.

On Wednesday evening, I managed to stump the doc. He knows my name (despite there being upwards of 300 people in the class--he remembers them all) and he'll remember this come grade time.

The movies the previous week, Thanksgiving week, were The Cable Guy and Death Becomes Her. I've never seen The Cable Guy--I've gotta watch it. I have seen Death Becomes Her and I was surprised by the general tenor of the conversation that began about it, about how it was a light-hearted farce and it was all about the pressures of fashion and style and the entertainment industry. Dr. Drew raved about how much he loved this movie.

I raised my hand. He said, "Diane, right?" I nodded and began. This is probably incoherent and I'm a terrible public speaker:

I loathed this movie. It's one of the most misogynistic movies I've ever seen. These two women are made fun of for wanting to retain their youth and beauty, and Bruce Willis gets lauded at his funeral with "Life begins at 50"--after 50 he had a family and had a bunch of kids, which is precisely what women can't do. It's like they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Dr. Drew stared at me for a second, then went on to the next student. This caused a ripple of laughter, because Dr. Drew always says something about students' comments, especially when they're confrontational, the way mine were. He said, "I have to think about this." He never did say anything about them.

After the movie, the recent Sabrina, Lise came up to me and said she appreciated my comments, and she didn't think the (overwhelmingly undergraduate) students in the class had gotten the subtext of the movie. Mind you, Lise had made her own comments in class and didn't support me then. Oh well.

Today, at the Cafe 84 cafeteria, a young woman came up to me and said, "Diane?" I said yes. She said she was in Dr. Drew's class and she wanted to thank me for what I said--she hadn't liked the movie, and she hadn't really come up with why. I said thank you, and wasn't it weird that Dr. Drew hadn't said anything about my comments?

"You stumped the doc," she said.

So I felt good about having said it--whenever you agree with someone, please tell them so, it means it a lot--but I can't wait to hear what Dr. Drew thought of it, particularly about a movie he loves, when calculating my grade.

My day went rapidly downhill after that, because right after Angie, Carolann, and I picked up lunch we had to hurry to Thesis class.

In which I got reamed. Ow.

Len had read my 124 pages and if he found anything worthwhile in there, he kept it to himself. And since Len is usually pretty effusive with good points and bad points, this was a bad sign.

I found it very difficult to respond to his criticisms. For example, he pointed out a technique I use for special criticism, which is to separate various actions or images into separate paragraphs. This tends to lead to very small paragraphs:

    His fingers curl around the barrel of the gun.
    
    A CAT YOWL sounds in the distance.
        
    The man glances at the corner of the alley.

This is an extreme example. I don't feel like looking through my screenplay (right now, if ever again) for a specific example.

He kept talking about using camera directions. I don't use camera directions; I never have. You will never see "CLOSE-UP ON" or "DOLLY INTO" or "We see" in my scripts. I try to direct the reader's eye, not lay out the cinematographer's job specifically. (No matter how many times I said this, Len kept saying that I'm using camera directions. It began to annoy me after the third time.)

Another reason I tend to use these short, staccato paragraphs is that no one reads the paragraphs that are big blocks of text. So often I've heard, "When did that happen?" only to show that it's right there in the script. The page-scanning techniques that script format encourages the eye to skip right past something, so you have to call everything out.

It went on from there, right into character and plot and how most of it was bullshit.

At the break everyone commiserated with me, saying that they know how horrible it is--Linda went on especially, but while Len has gotten her repeatedly on a certain writing techniques she uses, he's never criticized any other aspect of her writing--and how it's going to happen to them next semester. But I felt pretty demoralized.

Class went extremely long. We got out at 7:15. I got home after 8 and Darin took me out to dinner. I asked him why he never asks me how my day was. He asked, and when I told him he said I have to learn to take criticism.

My first reaction was to think, fine, I won't tell you ever again when I'm really upset. I'll probably get over this.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I noticed my longer nails were getting weak and bending. I glanced at my left index finger and noticed a thin white line right at the corner of my cuticle. A tear. Right now it's 2 millimeters long and I don't want to make it any longer. Any ideas on how to repair nail breaks? It's going to be weeks before this tear makes it any decent length down the nail.